On November 3rd, General Pervez Musharraf enforced his second coup, a
little over eight years after the first one that brought him to
power. His reason? That this was the only way to ensure that the so-
called ‘war on terror’ remained on track. The brutality that has
been exhibited by the regime in the three days since the November 3rd
announcement of ‘emergency’ (read: martial law) has been plain for
the world to see. However, some are still willing to argue that
Musharraf is indeed right in asserting that only strong-arm measures
can contain the spread of ‘extremism’.
Let us not forget that the focus of the corporate media has only
recently turned back towards the long forgotten ‘other’ front of
the ‘war on terror’, namely Afghanistan. Accordingly General
Musharraf’s role in fighting the ‘extremist’ threat has also
come into the spotlight. Over the past year or so there has been
increasing pressure on the Bush administration from within the US to
reevaluate its generous military and financial aid disbursements to
Pakistan because there is a belief that the Pakistani military is not
doing all it can in the mystical ’Pakistan-Afghanistan border region’
where all of the world’s militants seem to have converged.
Recently Benazir Bhutto has been permitted to return to the country
by the military, a step widely believed to have been engineered in
London and Washington. Ostensibly Bush and Brown see Ms. Bhutto to be
crucial to pushing the agenda of ‘moderates’ and more specifically
generating some kind of popular support for the ‘war on terror’,
whilst also compelling the military to come through on its 6-year old
commitment to challenging ‘extremism’.
Notwithstanding the suspicions that much of the liberal elite in
Pakistan may harbour vis a vis Ms. Bhutto – largely because of the
populist history of her Pakistan People’s Party – there does seem
to be an emerging consensus within this elite that the question of
how to handle the ’extremist’ threat has emerged as the most
important question facing Pakistan at the present time. Some
’moderates’ might argue that this has been a concern for some time
now — they have consistently issued warnings about the creeping
threat of ’Talibanisation’ since the regime of that name came to
power in Afghanistan over a decade ago. Aside from the fact that the
familiarity of the ‘moderates vs. extremists’ discourse can be
attributed in large part to the ravings of the western media, it is
true that alongside the situation in the areas immediately gripped by
conflict, there is quite serious polarisation in adjacent parts of
Pakistan, and that it is deepening with each passing day.
Over the past few weeks, there have been a spate of bombings and
attacks that have been attributed to ‘extremists’, most directed
at police and other security personnel, with the notable exception
being the deadly attack on Benazir Bhutto’s convoy on her return.
The intensity of the attacks has seemed to increase in direct
correlation to the intensification of American/Pakistani bombings of
the tribal areas and more recently adjacent regions such as Swat.
Notwithstanding the very real possibility that fragments of the state
are involved in these attacks, the deteriorating situation in the
country is of concern not just to the ‘moderates’ but to all
Pakistanis.
In trying to make sense of what is going on at the present time, and
particularly in objectively analyzing the moderates’ case, it is
crucial to bear in mind that the liberal elite has a history of being
short-sighted at best, and downright hypocritical at worst in
adjusting its politics to the perceived needs of the hour. It was a
significant section of Pakistan’s liberal elite that acquiesced to
the cynical use of religion by military ruler Zia-ul-Haq following
his coming to power in 1977. Such alignment apparently made sense at
the time because the need of the hour was the elimination of the
populist politics that threatened to reconfigure the balance of power
in Pakistan in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As is now well-known Zia’s Islamisation coincided with the use of
jihad as a plank of strategic policy by Islamabad in consonance with
the geo-strategic objectives of American imperialism in the region.
And is also now well-known, the mujahideen of the 1980s have morphed
into today’s ‘extremists’. Pakistan’s establishment of course
reluctantly agreed to the about-turn in strategic policy – at least
formally - following the infamous ultimatum issued by President
George W Bush to the General Headquarters (GHQ) a few days after the
September 11 attacks.
Towards the end of the dark Zia period, the ‘moderates’ recognized
just how significant the impacts of ‘Islamisation’ were, that they
had aligned themselves to a regime that did not share their social
sensibilities. Ever since the ‘moderates’ have been insisting on
the need for the government to reign in the ‘extremists’ and
prevent Pakistan from becoming a Talibanised pariah state.
More recently this narrative has evolved in a direction that raises
serious questions for progressives that are confronting empire all
over the globe, and in particular at the three major fronts of the
‘war on terror’: Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. Specifically,
Pakistani ’moderates’ have been insisting that this is Pakistan’s war
or, more precisely, the Pakistani people’s war. They argue that it is
imbecilic to try and stave off what they believe to be an inevitable
clash with ’extremists’ — the tone is very often Huntingtonian – by
taking refuge in the argument that this is America’s war. Slightly
nuanced versions of this argument look towards the ’judicious use of
force’ to win the hearts and minds of the Pakistani public.
Benazir Bhutto has been quoted as saying that the only long-term
solution to the ’extremist’ threat (within Pakistan at least) is to
bring the tribal areas within the political mainstream and allow
political parties to function freely there. To be fair, of all the
possible options proffered by the ’moderates’, this one seems to be
the most far-sighted. Yet at the same time, Benazir seems intent on
reinforcing the ’moderate’ vs ’extremist’ binary, deliberately
kissing up to the US (and the West more generally), and thereby
alienating herself from at least some of the people she would
ostensibly hope to reach if and when a political process was
initiated in the tribal areas.
What should not be lost on anyone is the fact that the spectre of
’Talibanisation’ is acute only in certain geographical zones of the
country, which is why Benazir’s pro-America stance does not seem to
have affected her traditional stronghold in, for example, Sindh (as
evident from the reception she received on October 18 on her return
to Pakistan). This is not to suggest that polarisation is not
increasing or that more and more people will not eschew the
mainstream political process if they perceive all major players to be
only fighting over the scraps being thrown their way from Washington,
but only to point out that it is important to keep the premonitions
of the ’moderates’ in perspective.
The fact of the matter is that what is going on in the tribal areas
and spreading into some of the settled Pakhtun districts is a
function of America’s war — a war that started in the late 1970s and
has now morphed into something quite different in accordance with
Uncle Sam’s changed geo-strategic priorities. It is true that the
Pakistani state — and particularly the military — has had a stake
in both this and previous wars in the region, and that, to this
extent only, this is Pakistan’s war. But to suggest that this is the
Pakistani people’s war is almost perverse.
It is not the Pakistani people’s war because jihad was sponsored not
by the people but by the American and Pakistani establishments, and
similarly the decision to now combat jihad is not a decision of the
people but that of the American and Pakistani establishments. To
suggest that it is the responsibility of people to clean up the mess
that has been created by the CIA’s and ISI’s cynical use of religion,
and their systematic promotion of violence within a particular set of
communities, is to very conveniently assume that the people also see
the world in straight lines like the ’moderates’ view the ’extremists’.
What people do see at the present juncture is a behemoth in the form
of the US, waging endless war with the support of the Pakistani
military that has turned against the very forces that it once
cultivated. Thus there is deep anger and in the absence of serious
political alternatives — a grim reality for which one also has
America and the GHQ to thank — the rise of rightist forms of
resistance is hardly surprising. Meanwhile the military is wracked by
internal conflicts over the abandonment of a time-tested strategic
policy, which is giving rise to intrigue of an altogether more
treacherous kind. There is also severe demoralisation within the
military’s rank and file, as it becomes painfully clear that this is
not an epic historical battle between ’moderates’ and ’extremists’
but rather a fallout of the self-serving policies of the US, the most
brash imperial power the world has ever known.
Now that the war is at the doorstep of Pakistanis, one can understand
the dilemmas that have been plaguing radicals in Palestine for many
years, or comrades in Iraq for almost as long. As the ‘war on
terror’ has inflicted death and destruction on more and more
Palestinians and Iraqis, ‘Islamists’ have seen their support base
expand. The global anti-war movement faced questions soon after the
beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003 about the fact that a major
section of the Iraqi resistance was motivated by ‘Islamist’
ideologies of various kinds. At the time the consensus seemed to be
that such was the nature of the contradiction that it was impossible
to raise opposition to such forces at that particular juncture.
In Palestine, the consensus has been even more widespread.
Specifically, Hamas is hardly considered by most observers to be a
fountainhead of progressive politics, yet over the past couple of
years progressives everywhere have found themselves turned into
supporters of the organization as the treachery of the US, Israel and
increasingly Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah becomes more and more difficult
to ignore.
It is true that the nature of the contradiction that has emerged in
the wreckage of imperialist war in Iraq, Palestine and Pakistan-
Afghanistan must be considered in all of its contextual specificity.
Pakistan does have internal cleavages that it must confront, which to
some extent derive from the dialectic of state and Islam that
reflects the country’s genesis as a prospective home for the
subcontinent’s Muslims. As a distinct ethnic group, the Pakhtuns
(who are spread out across Pakistan and Afghanistan, and are the
dominant ethnic group in the latter; the Taliban, for example, is as
much an Islamist entity as a Pakhtun one) also need to delve into
their history and seek to resolve the long-standing tension between
the legacies of non-violence (as exemplified by the Gandhian Red
Shirts movement) and ‘Islamist’/tribal militancy.
However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the ‘Islamist’
wave has intensified as the Americans and their stooges everywhere
have become more shameless about the use of indiscriminate force. For
example to engage in the utterly useless debate over the balance of
power in the tribal areas between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, a
favourite of the media, is to gloss over the more important fact that
bombing the place into the stone age will serve only to confirm what
the British concluded about the Pakhtun tribes well over 150 years
ago — fighting them indiscriminately is a sure recipe for failure.
In the 20th century too, the US learned in many cases that its huge
military advantage counted for naught when fighting a guerilla force
that had won the hearts and minds of the local people who were facing
the brunt of the warfare. Add to this the fact that under the Pakhtun
tribal code, refuge is provided to outsiders believed to be the
victims of injustice even when they are not necessarily personal
favourites.
America’s war is plunging the region into a crisis from which it
looks increasingly unlikely to emerge. The only responsibility that
the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan must accept is that to free
themselves from the suffocating clutches of imperialism and its local
stooges. ’Moderates’ speak only for themselves when they call this a
people’s war. This is an imperialist war, and while all progressives
continue to confront difficult questions about the rise of rightists
in the wake of this war, putting our weight behind the aggressors
surely will not serve progressive causes in any meaningful way.
If nothing else, this fact should be clear in the aftermath of the
imposition of ‘emergency’. Everyone in Pakistan committed to a
secular, democratic order is currently being victimized while the
‘extremists’ that the media usually harps on about have suddenly
disappeared from the radar screen. The Pakistani military is and
always will be the nemesis of a truly progressive alternative, and so
long as it continues to be patronized by the most reactionary
American administration in decades, the situation in Pakistan and the
region will only deteriorate.