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	Workers Vanguard No. 967	22 October 2010

Washington Escalates Attacks in Pakistan

Bloody U.S. Imperialism Out of Afghanistan Now!

Barack Obama came to office pledging to step up the murderous U.S./NATO war in Afghanistan, including by intervening militarily in Pakistan to chase down Taliban leaders. As president, he has fulfilled that campaign promise and then some. While almost tripling the number of troops in Afghanistan to nearly 100,000, Obama has sharply stepped up attacks by pilotless drone aircraft in neighboring Pakistan, killing villagers by the score. The CIA carried out a record 26 such sorties last month. In a further escalation, U.S./NATO helicopters operating out of Afghanistan recently carried out several cross-border raids into Pakistan, including a September 30 attack in which they shot up a couple of border posts, killing three Pakistani soldiers.

As is inevitable in all imperialist occupations, the war in Afghanistan has entailed an endless series of atrocities directed against civilians, who have perished by the thousands. In the latest of the seemingly endless litany of sadistic outrages perpetrated by imperialist forces, a dozen U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Kandahar province have been charged in the random murder of Afghan civilians for sport. The soldiers cut up the bodies of their victims in order to save fingers and skulls as trophies of war.

The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 under George W. Bush was initially embraced by bourgeois liberals as a “just” response to the September 11 terror attacks. The occupations of Afghanistan and, later, Iraq were largely intended by the U.S. imperialists as an assertion of Washington’s willingness and ability to project military power and ride roughshod over anyone the imperialists perceive as standing in their way.

Today, with no end in sight to the Afghan quagmire and with their economies reeling from the world capitalist crisis, Washington’s NATO allies who have nearly 50,000 troops in Afghanistan, are increasingly withdrawing their contingents or preparing to do so: the Netherlands pulled out this summer, Canada is scheduled to do so next year and Poland’s newly elected president promised to follow suit by 2012. While maintaining some 50,000 troops in Iraq, Obama seeks to define an “exit strategy” from Afghanistan that can be implemented before the 2012 elections and will not be perceived as a humiliating debacle.

That strategy includes a massive expansion of secret CIA operations. Journalist Bob Woodward reports in his new book Obama’s Wars that the CIA created and controls a 3,000-man paramilitary army of Afghans known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, which carry out covert operations in Pakistan against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban militants. As Woodward explains, Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued under Bush to provide a legal basis for the CIA’s worldwide covert operations. Obama has enormously expanded the global deployment of special operations forces, which now operate in 75 countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The importance the administration places on these operations helps explain its uproar over the leaking of 76,000 classified U.S. military field reports posted in August on the Web site WikiLeaks. The logs show that CIA-led forces operate out of a string of bases along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, often using extreme ruthlessness against the civilian population. One report of a “home breach” speaks of an Afghan man who was “injured” when Afghan paramilitaries carried out the “traumatic amputation of fingers” on his left hand. Private Bradley Manning, who was stationed in Iraq, has been accused of downloading classified information and faces the threat of court-martial. Whether or not Private Manning was involved, the release of this data, far from being a crime, was a useful and brave act of solidarity with those suffering under the imperialist boot. We demand: Release Private Manning and drop the charges against him!

The U.S. air attacks in Pakistan have unleashed a wellspring of anger among all classes of the Pakistani population. While the increasing Predator drone attacks, run by the CIA out of military bases in Pakistan, have been carried out with the tacit approval of the military-backed regime, manned cross-border air strikes openly targeting Pakistani soldiers are something else again. Those attacks reportedly came after the Pakistani government turned a deaf ear to a demand by its imperialist patrons in Washington that it launch a military offensive in the North Waziristan tribal area against forces accused of fighting U.S./NATO troops in Afghanistan. At the insistence of Pakistan’s military chiefs, Islamabad retaliated by temporarily closing a key border crossing at the Khyber Pass. While U.S. military supplies were allowed to transit through a different border crossing, more than 100 supply trucks caught in the eleven-day traffic jam at the Khyber Pass were torched by Islamic insurgents.

Washington’s drive to carry the war into Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas, a stronghold of the Taliban and other Islamic insurgents, comes as U.S./NATO forces have manifestly lost control of the military situation in Afghanistan. Despite Obama’s touted “surge” of troop levels, a highly publicized offensive early this year against rural Marja in southern Afghanistan collapsed after U.S. Marines proved unable to uproot Taliban control of the area. Following that setback, the military brass stepped back from a planned offensive in Kandahar that, they had previously boasted, would break the back of Taliban power in the country’s second-largest city. That operation finally got underway recently to little fanfare, as chastened U.S. generals cautioned their Commander-in-Chief not to expect “significant” progress before his scheduled year-end status review on Afghanistan.

Following the Marja setback, the Obama administration let it be known that it was “revising its Afghanistan strategy to embrace the idea of negotiating with senior members of the Taliban” (London Guardian, 19 July). This policy did not sit well with many in U.S. ruling circles, with CIA chief Leon Panetta asking what the point of negotiations was if Islamic insurgents were not convinced “that they’re going to be defeated.”

The U.S./NATO occupation has meant unbridled corruption by Washington’s quislings in Kabul, continued brutal oppression of women and warfare among the various tribal warlords. As revolutionary Marxists, our starting point is proletarian class opposition to the U.S. rulers and the capitalist-imperialist system as a whole. Insofar as the forces on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq aim their blows against the imperialist occupiers, we call for their military defense while maintaining our political opposition to these forces, in the main Islamic fundamentalist. We call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and allied troops and bases from Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia and demand as well: Hands off Pakistan and Iran!

As we have repeatedly stressed, the chief means of defending neocolonial Afghanistan and Iraq against the overwhelming military might of the U.S. and its allies lies in international working-class struggle, especially by the multiracial American proletariat. The bourgeoisie’s relentless drive for profits necessarily results in neocolonial pillage and wars. Only by wresting the means of production from the hands of the capitalist rulers and creating an international planned economy can the needs of the working people in this country, and of the billions of toilers around the world who are now consigned to hideous poverty, begin to be met. Against the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which swears allegiance to U.S. imperialism’s “national interests,” we fight to forge a workers party that will lead the exploited and oppressed in socialist revolution.

For a Socialist Federation of South Asia

By increasingly ratcheting up their military intervention in Pakistan, the U.S. imperialists are intensifying the contradictions that are tearing at the fabric of that society and could well lead to the disintegration of that nuclear-armed state. Pakistan, like India, is a product of centuries of British colonial divide-and-rule domination culminating in the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent and the accompanying orgy of communalist slaughter among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.

Today, the same arrogant and brutal Punjabi ruling class that was carried over from British colonial rule lords it over Baluchis, Pashtuns and other oppressed nationalities in Pakistan. This “prison house of peoples” is held together through stark repression meted out by the army, which has ruled directly throughout most of Pakistan’s history. While the landed aristocracy, textile bosses and upper echelons of the military plunder the country’s wealth, the desperate poverty of the laboring masses can be gauged by the fact that fully 60 percent of children are stunted—many severely—by malnutrition.

It was against this backdrop that Pakistan was hit in August and September by massive flooding of the Indus River, which engulfed a fifth of the country’s surface—an area half the size of Italy—and left a staggering 20 million people homeless. The government largely left flood victims to fend for themselves, while the notoriously corrupt president Asif Zardari went on a pleasure junket to his French chateau. As for relief offered by the U.S. military, with most Pakistanis viewing the U.S. as an enemy, Islamabad imposed tight constraints: American troops delivering aid were not allowed to carry guns, and relief flights by military cargo planes over Pakistani territory were eventually ordered to cease. Meanwhile, with the country still reeling from the effects of the deluge, several Pakistani cities were hit with renewed sectarian terrorism, including a September 3 attack on Shi’ites in Quetta that left 73 people dead.

While many of Pakistan’s textile factories have been mothballed due to the global economic crisis, Pakistan has a significant working class, one with a history of combative class struggle. The task of liberating all the exploited and oppressed of the Indian subcontinent demands the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisies in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and the establishment of a socialist federation of South Asia. Only an internationalist perspective, uniting class and other social struggles on the subcontinent with the fight for workers revolution in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries, can open the door to liberation for the impoverished masses, which will be achieved through the building of a socialist world order.