Vol. 71/No. 44      November 26, 2007

While the White House has urged Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to lift the state of emergency, it has said U.S. military funding for the regime, currently $80 million a month, will continue. Musharraf is an “indispensable” ally in the “war on terror,” President George Bush declared.

Washington has relied on a strong military regime in Pakistan as a staunch ally to help prosecute the war against the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and allied forces. And for most of the 60 years since the British imperialists created Pakistan, the army has ruled that country. The U.S. rulers are concerned about any destabilizing effects of weakening its role.

But the imperialist war in the region, Islamabad’s close ties to Washington, and the denial of basic democratic rights keep undermining support for Musharraf’s rule. In recent months Washington has tried to draw bourgeois opposition leader Benazir Bhutto into a power-sharing deal with Musharraf to give the regime a veneer of civilian rule and more legitimacy—while demanding it take stronger actions to combat “terrorism.”

To try to bolster its rule, the regime has suspended civil liberties, shut down media, and rounded up thousands, from opposition party figures to trade unionists. In face of sharp confrontations between security forces and protesters, Bhutto says she will scrap the proposed power-sharing pact and now calls for Musharraf to resign.

The crackdown in Pakistan further exposes the U.S. rulers’ hypocritical claim that their “war on terrorism” is about expanding freedom around the world. In reality, their war drive is about redividing the world—its markets, natural resources, labor, and territory—at the expense of their rival predators in Europe and Japan.

The capitalist rulers are sowing instability from the unintended consequences of their war drive. Pakistan is only the latest example. Another such crisis is in northern Iraq, where to gain the support of Kurds and consolidate its control in that country, Washington has allowed a semiautonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, which in turn poses a threat to the neighboring Turkish and Iranian ruling classes in their efforts to quell the Kurdish struggles for self-determination.

While militarily strong, U.S. imperialism is not able to stabilize a world in which the lives of millions of working people are marked by increased turmoil caused by the capitalist system itself. The destabilizing consequences of the war drive will keep opening up space in the Middle East and South Asia for workers and peasants to organize; for oppressed nationalities to fight for self-determination; for women to challenge inequality; for advances in the separation of religious institutions from politics and the state. That process will continue to unfold on a world scale.
 
 
Related articles:
Pakistani gov’t bars protests,jails unionists
U.S.: Musharraf ‘indispensable’ in ‘war on terror’  
 
 
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