It took a year-long mass uprising by virtually the whole
population of Pakistan to finally overthrow the hated military dictator
General Musharraf. This unique book is a diary of that struggle by one
of its most courageous participants.

With the exception of a handful of wild collapsed states,
Pakistan is probably today the most volatile society in the world: the
weakest link in the world chain. Since it is also to a great extent the
pivotal fulcrum upon which US imperialism is resting in its so-called
“war against terror” (more properly, its war against the oil-producing
nations), the fate of the whole world largely depends upon how events
play out there.

From the start, Pakistan was a monstrosity of a state. Born in a
conflagration of communal frenzy, it was an utterly unviable entity,
composed of two halves with nothing more substantial than a common
religion to connect them, separated by a thousand miles of hostile
territory. Millions were slaughtered to create it, as a direct result of a
fiendish imperialist conspiracy to cut across the solidarity of a sub-
continental-wide national liberation uprising.

Once established, the new state was an abortion. Created out
of a communal fantasy lumping together “Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir,
Iran, Sindh, Tukharistan, Afghanistan, Baluchistan ” (which gave this
artificial construct its clumsy acronym), it never seriously pursued its
inflated pretensions to extend its terrain to Iran, Tukharistan or
Afghanistan, nor even to Kashmir. It cut a river of blood through
Punjab, and has barely managed to maintain a feeble grip on Sindh – to
say nothing of Baluchistan or the North-West Frontier Province
(Afghania), which is nominally provinces of Pakistan, but where over
huge tracts the government’s writ does not run and its armies hardly
dare venture. And yet Pakistan emerged from a bloody birth carrying
on its back the bleeding half of a ravaged Bengal to which it had never
previously laid claim, at a distance of a thousand miles: a people with a
distinct culture, language and history, who outnumbered their co-
subjects and from the start bitterly resented their annexation by the
distant feudal overlords of Punjab. To drag East Bengal into a state
dominated by West Punjab was completely unviable, and the secession
of Bangladesh was as inevitable as the revolt of the Philippines against
Spain. At the very first opportunity, the East Bengalis tore themselves
free, though only at the cost of three million lives.

The creation of Pakistan was a blunder even more
misconceived and even less viable than that other communal statelet
established almost simultaneously... Israel. And its 62-year history has
witnessed the burial of an even greater number of victims in the two
states’ respective consequential futile wars.

Pakistan could only survive by accepting the humiliating role
of a US client state throughout the Cold War, fighting surrogate
diplomatic and military wars, first against Soviet-patronized India and
later against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. In the process, Pakistan was
forced to stagger under the weight of a constantly swelling tumour, in
the form of a crazed clerical-fascist military intelligence state-within-a-
state. Among the horrors spawned by the ISI, its coffers swilling with
dollars, was al-Qaida, the most notorious of its creatures. Every al-
Qaida atrocity bears the hallmarks of the ISI, the monster which the
CIA nuzzled to its breast.

The succession of tumbling ex-Sandhurst tinpot military
dictators swept away by defeat in the Bangladesh war, which at a stroke
reduced the reach of the Punjabi feudal ruling caste by more than half,
plunged what was left of Pakistan into revolution. Strikes, gheraos,
uprisings, occupations, mutinies, millions on the march, impelled
Bhutto the First – a suave playboy left holding the power following the
unceremonious flight of the generals – virtually a hostage to the
revolution played out on the streets.

Bhutto found himself suddenly denouncing the rule of the “22
families” (including his own), and until the movement began to
subside, helplessly ratifying the democratic anti-feudal reforms already
enacted by mass action on the ground. For these concessions, he was
never to be forgiven by the feudal elite.

Barbaric revenge was soon to be inflicted by its vicious
personification, the odious General Zia ul-Haq, in the form of an
eleven-year reign of terror: mass hangings, torture and floggings.
Bhutto personally was humiliated, tortured and hanged, and countless
thousands publicly flogged into submission.

Throughout that long dark night of torture, an entire
generation of workers and peasants never forgot that brief glimmer of
human hope that they had experienced in those earlier days: that faint
spark of expectation that they might one day rise above the level of
brute pack-animals. That is the basis of the continuing, though
successively tarnished, Bhutto name, and the waning appeal of the PPP,
despite the fact that whenever it was returned to power following the
fall of yet another general, it cosied up to the US embassy and betrayed
once again the people’s illusions. Pakistan has thus continued its
tawdry cycle of blundering pantomime military dictatorships,
interspersed with brief chaotic interregnums of corrupt quasi-
parliamentary regimes.

With the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the collapse of the
USSR, and the rise in the shape of al-Qaida of a new enemy raised and
fed from within its own banks and embassies, US imperialism found
itself in the humiliating position of having to depend upon a despised
and universally derided military dictator who finally had no hope of
clinging even to the last trappings of power for more than a matter of
weeks; on a military machine incapable of even encountering, let alone
defeating, its enemies; and on an intelligence apparatus half of which
continues to support the other side.

Today, we see in Pakistan not only the weakest link in the
worldwide chain, but a rapidly developing revolutionary situation too.
In writings almost reminiscent of those of John Reed (the brilliant
American on-the-spot reporter in Russia in October 1917 who
chronicled what he called the “ten days that shook the world”) Farooq
too has graphically brought to life in these pages a revolution in the
making: the masses’ heroic expression of anger, solidarity and growing
determination.

For now, their hopes have once again been betrayed by the
party of the feudal dynasty which through an accident of history came
to be entrusted with them (the PPP), and cynically exploited by its
gangster-businessmen rivals (the PMLN). The leaders of both these
parties were united in common dread of the mass movement that was to
sweep them into power in a brief coalition, and who even resorted to
propping up the tottering dictator for a last few months before he
finally had to go.

I have had the privilege of knowing Farooq Tariq as a
comrade and friend, together with the pioneers of what later became the
Labour Party Pakistan, for 28 years. In 1980, on behalf of a worldwide
network of socialists called the Committee for a Workers’ International
(CWI), I visited a group of Pakistani opponents of General Zia who had
been forced into temporary refuge in the Netherlands. In 1982, Farooq
and his comrades were arrested by the Dutch police on trumped-up
charges of “conspiracy to hi-jack an aircraft”. The blame for this
ridiculous accusation belonged not to the Netherlands authorities, who
were acting in good faith on a false tip-off, but to the dirty-tricks
brigade of the Zia gangster dictatorship. Farooq and his comrades
were fully exonerated and went on to launch one of the most
successful underground resistance propaganda newspapers ever
seen, Jeddo-juhd (Struggle), which operated as a militant faction of
the Pakistan Peoples Party.

With the fall of the Zia regime, the group made an instant
impact back home. It was just at this time, however, that the CWI
internationally suffered a split which had damaging repercussions in
Pakistan along with all the other countries where it had a base. Soon
afterwards, both the contending factions of the CWI were to sever their
connections with Farooq and his comrades.

From the very beginning, Farooq has shown that same
combination of courage, energy, modesty, humour and quiet
determination that has since won the Labour Party Pakistan the loyalty
of many thousands of super-exploited workers and peasants. Tempered
in the crucible of sacrifice, solidarity and struggle, the LPP represents
their best hope today.

Will it succeed in taking up its rightful leadership of the
masses’ struggle? From Farooq’s inspiring reports, it is clear that by its
courage, its transparent honesty, and its brilliant tactical flair, it has
captured the imagination of workers and peasants, at least in some
areas, as well as that of a layer of professionals, in the form of the
advocates’ movement. Will it be able to harness the energies of the
masses now that they are once again on the move? Can it ultimately
lead them to a decisive victory? And if not this time, can it at least
leave behind it a heritage and a lasting tradition which will ensure that
the next wave of mass struggle starts from a higher level?

As Farooq would be the first to agree, this will be decided not
just by tactics – by agitational brilliance – but also by theoretical and
strategic vision. The movement in Pakistan has snatched away from
socialist commentators around the world the luxury of comfortable
platitudes and abstract discussion, and forced them to focus on the
constant crucial decisions of a living struggle. Finding the right means
of balancing bold leadership of every democratic struggle, on the one
hand, with clear warnings, sharply defined perspectives and a
transitional programme, on the other, is precisely the science of
revolution, as we see from the deeds of Lenin and Trotsky in Russia in
1917.

Pakistan in 2008 is of course not Russia in 1917. In Pakistan,
counter-revolution in the form of mystical obscurantism already has a
mass base, an ideological appeal and an army strong enough in wide
swathes of territory to hold the state itself at bay. Conversely, unlike in
Russia, the proletariat is relatively weak and scattered. The tireless
militant workers of the LPP are facing a harder task. All the more glory
to them for their success in building their authority in the struggle.
This authority is not limited to their role within the Pakistani
working class. They are rightly building their prestige also
internationally, through their contacts in the Indian sub-continent,
South-East Asia, the Pacific region, Australia and Europe. Within their
own modest limits, socialists internationally share a duty to observe,
discuss and support their comrades of the LPP, both practically and in
terms of theoretical discussion and an exchange of ideas. We have a lot
to learn from their experience. Before too long, we will all be facing
similar difficult questions.