[NYTr] Washington's war spreads to Pakistan

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Workers World - Aug 2, 2007 issue
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/pakistan-0802


Washington's war spreads to Pakistan

By Deirdre Griswold

Pressures from the Bush administration on the regime of Gen. Pervez
Musharraf of Pakistan are pushing that country into an acute social
crisis.

Frustrated in their efforts to conquer Iraq or even poverty-stricken
Afghanistan, yet reluctant to deploy their own frazzled troops in even
more combat zones, the U.S. imperialist leaders have been leaning
heavily on Musharraf to attack Afghan insurgents and any Pakistanis in
the border region who might be sympathetic to them.

A Reuters story filed from Miranshah, Pakistan, on July 25 reported
that “Several thousand villagers fled a Pakistani tribal region on
Wednesday, where an army offensive was expected any day following
pressure on Pakistan from the United States to act against al Qaeda
cells.”

With antiwar sentiment in the U.S. shaking up the political scene and
George W. Bush’s popularity still in the cellar, the U.S. president is
desperately playing the Qaeda card in all his public pronouncements,
using the “fear factor” generated by 9/11 to justify his continued
colonial occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It remains a fact, however, that the aggressive thrust of the U.S.
military into this oil- and gas-rich area of the world has outraged the
peoples who live there and is what has inspired many to fight against
the foreign invaders. Those fitting this description are not al Qaeda
but the U.S. and its partner Britain, the former colonial master in
much of the Middle East and South Asia.

In Pakistan, the opposition to Musharraf comes not only from militant
Islamic groups—like the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad that was
brutally attacked by the Pakistan Army on July 10 on orders from
Washington, causing hundreds of casualties—but from secular, democratic
forces and also from the Marxist left, which in the past was often the
main target of government oppression.

Musharraf came to power in 1999 through a military coup but then
managed to get himself named president. This year, according to
Pakistan’s constitution, he must be reelected or stand down. He
precipitated a constitutional crisis when, in March, he dismissed Chief
Justice Muhammad Chaudhry. Huge demonstrations supporting Chaudhry
erupted all over the country.

On July 20 the Pakistan Supreme Court reinstated the chief justice,
ruling that Musharraf’s dismissal of Chaudhry had been illegal.
Pakistanis at home and in the diaspora joyfully celebrated this rebuke
to the regime.

However, Musharraf has the army and the backing of Washington. He has
80,000 troops in the northwest areas of Pakistan, where opposition to
his rule has been most militant. And, should he falter in carrying out
Washington’s wishes, the U.S. has already threatened to bomb Pakistan
“back to the Stone Age,” according to Musharraf himself in an interview
with “60 Minutes” last Sept. 24.

One way or the other, the war for empire begun in Iraq is surely coming
to Pakistan. This rapidly deteriorating situation is just another
reason why all who struggle for peace and justice should be preparing
now to make the Sept. 22-29 anti-war actions in Washington a powerful
effort to pull back the imperialists as they throw more troops and
money into a war for global domination that even Bush admits is
“endless.”

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