Pakistan: The Myth of Sovereignty

Written by Lal Khan
Friday, 06 May 2011



The hoarse bleating and the paranoia unleashed by the media and the intelligentsia in Pakistan complaining about the US operation in Abbotabad as a “breach of sovereignty” is mindboggling to say the least. When did Pakistan ever have genuine and complete sovereignty in its history?

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RENEGADE EYE

Bhutto: A Legacy Betrayed

Written by Lal Khan
Tuesday, 19 April 2011


Bhutto speaking in Simla. Photo: Abbt850

Thirty two years ago on the night of 3rd and 4th April 1979, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was assassinated on the gallows in Rawalpindi jail. This was probably the most significant political murder in the history of the country. A terrified state, headed by the country’s most brutal and vicious dictator Zia ul Haq carried out this harrowing act.

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RENEGADE EYE

Stratfor: Pakistan and the U.S. Exit From Afghanistan

By George Friedman
September 28, 2010



Bob Woodward has released another book, this one on the debate over Afghanistan strategy in the Obama administration. As all his books do, the book has riveted Washington. It reveals that intense debate occurred over what course to take, that the president sought alternative strategies and that compromises were reached. But while knowing the details of these things is interesting, what would have been shocking is if they hadn’t taken place.

It is interesting to reflect on the institutional inevitability of these disagreements. The military is involved in a war. It is institutionally and emotionally committed to victory in the theater of combat. It will demand all available resources for executing the war under way. For a soldier who has bled in that war, questioning the importance of the war is obscene. A war must be fought relentlessly and with all available means.

But while the military’s top generals and senior civilian leadership are responsible for providing the president with sound, clearheaded advice on all military matters including the highest levels of grand strategy, they are ultimately responsible for the pursuit of military objectives to which the commander-in-chief directs them. Generals must think about how to win the war they are fighting. Presidents must think about whether the war is worth fighting. The president is responsible for America’s global posture. He must consider what an unlimited commitment to a particular conflict might mean in other regions of the world where forces would be unavailable.

A president must take a more dispassionate view than his generals. He must calculate not only whether victory is possible but also the value of the victory relative to the cost. Given the nature of the war in Afghanistan, U.S. President Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus — first the U.S. Central Command chief and now the top commander in Afghanistan — had to view it differently. This is unavoidable. This is natural. And only one of the two is ultimately in charge.

The Nature of Guerrilla Warfare

In thinking about Afghanistan, it is essential that we begin by thinking about the nature of guerrilla warfare against an occupying force. The guerrilla lives in the country. He isn’t going anywhere else, as he has nowhere to go. By contrast, the foreigner has a place to which he can return. This is the core weakness of the occupier and the strength of the guerrilla. The former can leave and in all likelihood, his nation will survive. The guerrilla can’t. And having alternatives undermines the foreigner’s will to fight regardless of the importance of the war to him.

The strategy of the guerrilla is to make the option to withdraw more attractive. In order to do this, his strategic goal is simply to survive and fight on whatever level he can. His patience is built into who he is and what he is fighting for. The occupier’s patience is calculated against the cost of the occupation and its opportunity costs, thus, while troops are committed in this country, what is happening elsewhere?

Tactically, the guerrilla survives by being elusive. He disperses in small groups. He operates in hostile terrain. He denies the enemy intelligence on his location and capabilities. He forms political alliances with civilians who provide him supplies and intelligence on the occupation forces and misleads the occupiers about his own location. The guerrilla uses this intelligence network to decline combat on the enemy’s terms and to strike the enemy when he is least prepared. The guerrilla’s goal is not to seize and hold ground but to survive, evade and strike, imposing casualties on the occupier. Above all, the guerrilla must never form a center of gravity that, if struck, would lead to his defeat. He thus actively avoids anything that could be construed as a decisive contact.

The occupation force is normally a more conventional army. Its strength is superior firepower, resources and organization. If it knows where the guerrilla is and can strike before the guerrilla can disperse, the occupying force will defeat the guerrilla. The occupier’s problems are that his intelligence is normally inferior to that of the guerrillas; the guerrillas rarely mass in ways that permit decisive combat and normally can disperse faster than the occupier can pinpoint and deploy forces against them; and the guerrillas’ superior tactical capabilities allow them to impose a constant low rate of casualties on the occupier. Indeed, the massive amount of resources the occupier requires and the inflexibility of a military institution not solely committed to the particular theater of operations can actually work against the occupier by creating logistical vulnerabilities susceptible to guerrilla attacks and difficulty adapting at a rate sufficient to keep pace with the guerrilla. The occupation force will always win engagements, but that is never the measure of victory. If the guerrillas operate by doctrine, defeats in unplanned engagements will not undermine their basic goal of survival. While the occupier is not winning decisively, even while suffering only some casualties, he is losing. While the guerrilla is not losing decisively, even if suffering significant casualties, he is winning. Since the guerrilla is not going anywhere, he can afford far higher casualties than the occupier, who ultimately has the alternative of withdrawal.

The asymmetry of this warfare favors the guerrilla. This is particularly true when the strategic value of the war to the occupier is ambiguous, where the occupier does not possess sufficient force and patience to systematically overwhelm the guerrillas, and where either political or military constraints prevent operations against sanctuaries. This is a truth as relevant to David’s insurgency against the Philistines as it is to the U.S. experience in Vietnam or the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.

There has long been a myth about the unwillingness of Americans to absorb casualties for very long in guerrilla wars. In reality, the United States fought in Vietnam for at least seven years (depending on when you count the start and stop) and has now fought in Afghanistan for nine years. The idea that Americans can’t endure the long war has no empirical basis. What the United States has difficulty with — along with imperial and colonial powers before it — is a war in which the ability to impose one’s will on the enemy through force of arms is lacking and when it is not clear that the failure of previous years to win the war will be solved in the years ahead.

Far more relevant than casualties to whether Americans continue a war is the question of the conflict’s strategic importance, for which the president is ultimately responsible. This divides into several parts. This first is whether the United States has the ability with available force to achieve its political goals through prosecuting the war (since all war is fought for some political goal, from regime change to policy shift) and whether the force the United States is willing to dedicate suffices to achieve these goals. To address this question in Afghanistan, we have to focus on the political goal.

The Evolution of the U.S. Political Goal in Afghanistan

Washington’s primary goal at the initiation of the conflict was to destroy or disrupt al Qaeda in Afghanistan to protect the U.S. homeland from follow-on attacks to 9/11. But if Afghanistan were completely pacified, the threat of Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism would remain at issue because it is no longer just an issue of a single organization — al Qaeda — but a series of fragmented groups conducting operations in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, Somalia and elsewhere.

Today, al Qaeda is simply one manifestation of the threat of this transnational jihadist phenomenon. It is important to stop and consider al Qaeda — and the transnational jihadist phenomenon in general — in terms of guerrillas, and to think of the phenomenon as a guerrilla force in its own right operating by the very same rules on a global basis. Thus, where the Taliban apply guerrilla principles to Afghanistan, today’s transnational jihadist applies them to the Islamic world and beyond. The transnational jihadists are not leaving and are not giving up. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, they will decline combat against larger American forces and strike vulnerable targets when they can.

There are certainly more players and more complexity to the global phenomenon than in a localized insurgency. Many governments across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have no interest in seeing these movements set up shop and stir up unrest in their territory. And al Qaeda’s devolution has seen frustrations as well as successes as it spreads. But the underlying principles of guerrilla warfare remain at issue. Whenever the Americans concentrate force in one area, al Qaeda disengages, disperses and regroups elsewhere and, perhaps more important, the ideology that underpins the phenomenon continues to exist. The threat will undoubtedly continue to evolve and face challenges, but in the end, it will continue to exist along the lines of the guerrilla acting against the United States.

There is another important way in which the global guerrilla analogy is apt. STRATFOR has long held that Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism does not represent a strategic, existential threat to the United States. While acts of transnational terrorism target civilians, they are not attacks — have not been and are not evolving into attacks — that endanger the territorial integrity of the United States or the way of life of the American people. They are dangerous and must be defended against, but transnational terrorism is and remains a tactical problem that for nearly a decade has been treated as if it were the pre-eminent strategic threat to the United States.

Nietzsche wrote that, “The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.” The stated U.S. goal in Afghanistan was the destruction of al Qaeda. While al Qaeda as it existed in 2001 has certainly been disrupted and degraded, al Qaeda’s evolution and migration means that disrupting and degrading it — to say nothing of destroying it — can no longer be achieved by waging a war in Afghanistan. The guerrilla does not rely on a single piece of real estate (in this case Afghanistan) but rather on his ability to move seamlessly across terrain to evade decisive combat in any specific location. Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism is not centered on Afghanistan and does not need Afghanistan, so no matter how successful that war might be, it would make little difference in the larger fight against transnational jihadism.

Thus far, the United States has chosen to carry on fighting the war in Afghanistan. As al Qaeda has fled Afghanistan, the overall political goal for the United States in the country has evolved to include the creation of a democratic and uncorrupt Afghanistan. It is not clear that anyone knows how to do this, particularly given that most Afghans consider the ruling government of President Hamid Karzai — with which the United States is allied — as the heart of the corruption problem, and beyond Kabul most Afghans do not regard their way of making political and social arrangements to be corrupt.

Simply withdrawing from Afghanistan carries its own strategic and political costs, however. The strategic problem is that simply terminating the war after nine years would destabilize the Islamic world. The United States has managed to block al Qaeda’s goal of triggering a series of uprisings against existing regimes and replacing them with jihadist regimes. It did this by displaying a willingness to intervene where necessary. Of course, the idea that U.S. intervention destabilized the region raises the question of what regional stability would look like had it not intervened. The danger of withdrawal is that the network of relationships the United States created and imposed at the regime level could unravel if it withdrew. America would be seen as having lost the war, the prestige of radical Islamists and thereby the foundation of the ideology that underpins their movement would surge, and this could destabilize regimes and undermine American interests.

The political problem is domestic. Obama’s approval rating now stands at 42 percent. This is not unprecedented, but it means he is politically weak. One of the charges against him, fair or not, is that he is inherently anti-war by background and so not fully committed to the war effort. Where a Republican would face charges of being a warmonger, which would make withdrawal easier, Obama faces charges of being too soft. Since a president must maintain political support to be effective, withdrawal becomes even harder. Therefore, strategic analysis aside, the president is not going to order a complete withdrawal of all combat forces any time soon — the national (and international) political alignment won’t support such a step. At the same time, remaining in Afghanistan is unlikely to achieve any goal and leaves potential rivals like China and Russia freer rein.

The American Solution

The American solution, one that we suspect is already under way, is the Pakistanization of the war. By this, we do not mean extending the war into Pakistan but rather extending Pakistan into Afghanistan. The Taliban phenomenon has extended into Pakistan in ways that seriously complicate Pakistani efforts to regain their bearing in Afghanistan. It has created a major security problem for Islamabad, which, coupled with the severe deterioration of the country’s economy and now the floods, has weakened the Pakistanis’ ability to manage Afghanistan. In other words, the moment that the Pakistanis have been waiting for — American agreement and support for the Pakistanization of the war — has come at a time when the Pakistanis are not in an ideal position to capitalize on it.

In the past, the United States has endeavored to keep the Taliban in Afghanistan and the regime in Pakistan separate. (The Taliban movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan are not one and the same.) Washington has not succeeded in this regard, with the Pakistanis continuing to hedge their bets and maintain a relationship across the border. Still, U.S. opposition has been the single greatest impediment to Pakistan’s consolidation of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and abandoning this opposition leaves important avenues open for Islamabad.

The Pakistani relationship to the Taliban, which was a liability for the United States in the past, now becomes an advantage for Washington because it creates a trusted channel for meaningful communication with the Taliban. Logic suggests this channel is quite active now.

The Vietnam War ended with the Paris peace talks. Those formal talks were not where the real bargaining took place but rather where the results were ultimately confirmed. If talks are under way, a similar venue for the formal manifestation of the talks is needed — and Islamabad is as good a place as any.

Pakistan is an American ally which the United States needs, both to balance growing Chinese influence in and partnership with Pakistan, and to contain India. Pakistan needs the United States for the same reason. Meanwhile, the Taliban want to run Afghanistan. The United States has no strong national interest in how Afghanistan is run so long as it does not support and espouse transnational jihadism. But it needs its withdrawal to take place in a manner that strengthens its influence rather than weakens it, and Pakistan can provide the cover for turning a retreat into a negotiated settlement.

Pakistan has every reason to play this role. It needs the United States over the long term to balance against India. It must have a stable or relatively stable Afghanistan to secure its western frontier. It needs an end to U.S. forays into Pakistan that are destabilizing the regime. And playing this role would enhance Pakistan’s status in the Islamic world, something the United States could benefit from, too. We suspect that all sides are moving toward this end.

The United States isn’t going to defeat the Taliban. The original goal of the war is irrelevant, and the current goal is rather difficult to take seriously. Even a victory, whatever that would look like, would make little difference in the fight against transnational jihad, but a defeat could harm U.S. interests. Therefore, the United States needs a withdrawal that is not a defeat. Such a strategic shift is not without profound political complexity and difficulties. But the disparity between — and increasingly, the incompatibility of — the struggle with transnational terrorism and the war effort geographically rooted in Afghanistan is only becoming more apparent — even to the American public.

RENEGADE EYE

Stratfor: WikiLeaks and the Afghan War

By George Friedman
July 27, 2010

On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.



Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior U.S. and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.

The WikiLeaks

At first glance, it is difficult to imagine a single database in which such a diverse range of intelligence was stored, or the existence of a single individual cleared to see such diverse intelligence stored across multiple databases and able to collect, collate and transmit the intelligence without detection. Intriguingly, all of what has been released so far has been not-so-sensitive material rated secret or below. The Times reports that Gul’s name appears all over the documents, yet very few documents have been released in the current batch, and it is very hard to imagine intelligence on Gul and his organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, being classified as only secret. So, this was either low-grade material hyped by the media, or there is material reviewed by the selected newspapers but not yet made public. Still, what was released and what the Times discussed is consistent with what most thought was happening in Afghanistan.

The obvious comparison is to the Pentagon Papers, commissioned by the Defense Department to gather lessons from the Vietnam War and leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the Times during the Nixon administration. Many people worked on the Pentagon Papers, each of whom was focused on part of it and few of whom would have had access to all of it.

Ellsberg did not give the Times the supporting documentation; he gave it the finished product. By contrast, in the WikiLeaks case, someone managed to access a lot of information that would seem to have been contained in many different places. If this was an unauthorized leak, then it had to have involved a massive failure in security. Certainly, the culprit should be known by now and his arrest should have been announced. And certainly, the gathering of such diverse material in one place accessible to one or even a few people who could move it without detection is odd.

Like the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks (as I will call them) elicited a great deal of feigned surprise, not real surprise. Apart from the charge that the Johnson administration contrived the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of what the Pentagon Papers contained was generally known. Most striking about the Pentagon Papers was not how much surprising material they contained, but how little. Certainly, they contradicted the official line on the war, but there were few, including supporters of the war, who were buying the official line anyway.

In the case of the WikiLeaks, what is revealed also is not far from what most people believed, although they provide enormous detail. Nor is it that far from what government and military officials are saying about the war. No one is saying the war is going well, though some say that given time it might go better.

The view of the Taliban as a capable fighting force is, of course, widespread. If they weren’t a capable fighting force, then the United States would not be having so much trouble defeating them. The WikiLeaks seem to contain two strategically significant claims, however. The first is that the Taliban are a more sophisticated fighting force than has been generally believed. An example is the claim that Taliban fighters have used man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) against U.S. aircraft. This claim matters in a number of ways. First, it indicates that the Taliban are using technologies similar to those used against the Soviets. Second, it raises the question of where the Taliban are getting them — they certainly don’t manufacture MANPADS themselves.

If they have obtained advanced technologies, this would have significance on the battlefield. For example, if reasonably modern MANPADS were to be deployed in numbers, the use of American airpower would either need to be further constrained or higher attrition rates accepted. Thus far, only first- and second-generation MANPADS without Infrared Counter-Countermeasures (which are more dangerous) appear to have been encountered, and not with decisive or prohibitive effectiveness. But in any event, this doesn’t change the fundamental character of the war.

Supply Lines and Sanctuaries

What it does raise is the question of supply lines and sanctuaries. The most important charge contained in the leaks is about Pakistan. The WikiLeaks contain documents that charge that the Pakistanis are providing both supplies and sanctuary to Taliban fighters while objecting to American forces entering Pakistan to clean out the sanctuaries and are unwilling or unable to carry out that operation by themselves (as they have continued to do in North Waziristan).

Just as important, the documents charge that the ISI has continued to maintain liaison and support for the Taliban in spite of claims by the Pakistani government that pro-Taliban officers had been cleaned out of the ISI years ago. The document charges that Gul, the director-general of the ISI from 1987 to 1989, still operates in Pakistan, informally serving the ISI and helping give the ISI plausible deniability.

Though startling, the charge that Islamabad is protecting and sustaining forces fighting and killing Americans is not a new one. When the United States halted operations in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets in 1989, U.S. policy was to turn over operations in Afghanistan to Pakistan. U.S. strategy was to use Islamist militants to fight the Soviets and to use Pakistani liaisons through the ISI to supply and coordinate with them. When the Soviets and Americans left Afghanistan, the ISI struggled to install a government composed of its allies until the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. The ISI’s relationship with the Taliban — which in many ways are the heirs to the anti-Soviet mujahideen — is widely known. In my book, “America’s Secret War,” I discussed both this issue and the role of Gul. These documents claim that this relationship remains intact. Apart from Pakistani denials, U.S. officials and military officers frequently made this charge off the record, and on the record occasionally. The leaks on this score are interesting, but they will shock only those who didn’t pay attention or who want to be shocked.

Let’s step back and consider the conflict dispassionately. The United States forced the Taliban from power. It never defeated the Taliban nor did it make a serious effort to do so, as that would require massive resources the United States doesn’t have. Afghanistan is a secondary issue for the United States, especially since al Qaeda has established bases in a number of other countries, particularly Pakistan, making the occupation of Afghanistan irrelevant to fighting al Qaeda.

For Pakistan, however, Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic interest. The region’s main ethnic group, the Pashtun, stretch across the Afghan-Pakistani border. Moreover, were a hostile force present in Afghanistan, as one was during the Soviet occupation, Pakistan would face threats in the west as well as the challenge posed by India in the east. For Pakistan, an Afghanistan under Pakistani influence or at least a benign Afghanistan is a matter of overriding strategic importance.

It is therefore irrational to expect the Pakistanis to halt collaboration with the force that they expect to be a major part of the government of Afghanistan when the United States leaves. The Pakistanis never expected the United States to maintain a presence in Afghanistan permanently. They understood that Afghanistan was a means toward an end, and not an end in itself. They understood this under George W. Bush. They understand it even more clearly under Barack Obama, who made withdrawal a policy goal.

Given that they don’t expect the Taliban to be defeated, and given that they are not interested in chaos in Afghanistan, it follows that they will maintain close relations with and support for the Taliban. Given that the United States is powerful and is Pakistan’s only lever against India, the Pakistanis will not make this their public policy, however. The United States has thus created a situation in which the only rational policy for Pakistan is two-tiered, consisting of overt opposition to the Taliban and covert support for the Taliban.

This is duplicitous only if you close your eyes to the Pakistani reality, which the Americans never did. There was ample evidence, as the WikiLeaks show, of covert ISI ties to the Taliban. The Americans knew they couldn’t break those ties. They settled for what support Pakistan could give them while constantly pressing them harder and harder until genuine fears in Washington emerged that Pakistan could destabilize altogether. Since a stable Pakistan is more important to the United States than a victory in Afghanistan — which it wasn’t going to get anyway — the United States released pressure and increased aid. If Pakistan collapsed, then India would be the sole regional power, not something the United States wants.

The WikiLeaks seem to show that like sausage-making, one should never look too closely at how wars are fought, particularly coalition warfare. Even the strongest alliances, such as that between the United States and the United Kingdom in World War II, are fraught with deceit and dissension. London was fighting to save its empire, an end Washington was hostile to; much intrigue ensued. The U.S.-Pakistani alliance is not nearly as trusting. The United States is fighting to deny al Qaeda a base in Afghanistan while Pakistan is fighting to secure its western frontier and its internal stability. These are very different ends that have very different levels of urgency.

The WikiLeaks portray a war in which the United States has a vastly insufficient force on the ground that is fighting a capable and dedicated enemy who isn’t going anywhere. The Taliban know that they win just by not being defeated, and they know that they won’t be defeated. The Americans are leaving, meaning the Taliban need only wait and prepare.

The Pakistanis also know that the Americans are leaving and that the Taliban or a coalition including the Taliban will be in charge of Afghanistan when the Americans leave. They will make certain that they maintain good relations with the Taliban. They will deny that they are doing this because they want no impediments to a good relationship with the United States before or after it leaves Afghanistan. They need a patron to secure their interests against India. Since the United States wants neither an India outside a balance of power nor China taking the role of Pakistan’s patron, it follows that the risk the United States will bear grudges is small. And given that, the Pakistanis can live with Washington knowing that one Pakistani hand is helping the Americans while another helps the Taliban. Power, interest and reality define the relations between nations, and different factions inside nations frequently have different agendas and work against each other.

The WikiLeaks, from what we have seen so far, detail power, interest and reality as we have known it. They do not reveal a new reality. Much will be made about the shocking truth that has been shown, which, as mentioned above, shocks only those who wish to be shocked. The Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. The WikiLeaks contain all the details.

We are left with the mystery of who compiled all of these documents and who had access to them with enough time and facilities to transmit them to the outside world in a blatant and sustained breach of protocol. The image we have is of an unidentified individual or small group working to get a “shocking truth” out to the public, only the truth is not shocking — it is what was known all along in excruciating detail. Who would want to detail a truth that is already known, with access to all this documentation and the ability to transmit it unimpeded? Whoever it proves to have been has just made the most powerful case yet for withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather than later.

RENEGADE EYE

Lahore Terrorist Mayhem Shows Crisis of Pakistani State

By our correspondent in Lahore
Monday, 30 March 2009

At half past eight this morning (March 30) terrorists used machine guns and grenades to launch a savage attack on a police training academy in Manawan, on the outskirts of Lahore. The police and special forces remain locked in pitched battle with the attackers who are hidden inside various buildings at the site, as emergency services are scrambling to evacuate the wounded to nearby hospitals.


Frictions are occuring between the two allies as the war in Afganistan intensifies. Photo by travlr on Flickr.

According to private television channels at least 20 policemen are dead and 150 injured. Two militants have also been killed according to Rangers personnel. “The number of killed is at least 20,” police sub inspector Amjad Ahmad told AFP outside the police training ground in Manawan. However, given the murderous crossfire as police attempted to flush out the terrorists inside the building, the death count may turn out to be much higher.

The incident took place as trainees were participating in a morning parade. Eyewitness accounts estimate some 10 militants carried out the attack, and at least 11 explosions have been heard so far. According to reports, some of the attackers entered the academy wearing police uniforms.

The location of the attack is significant, since Manawan is close to the road that leads to the Indian border. Clearly, the implication is meant to be drawn that the hand of India is behind this latest outrage. In the same way, some sections here tried to pin the blame for the recent killings of Sri Lankan cricketers (also in Lahore) on India, allegedly as retaliation for the Mumbai atrocity.

However, there is a far more likely explanation, and it points an accusing finger at a source far nearer to home. Yesterday the Pakistan authorities conveyed their “concerns” through diplomatic channels over certain aspects of the new policy for the region announced by President Barack Obama on Friday.

“We will speak to them (the United States) on issues of concern in subsequent diplomatic negotiations,” the President’s spokesman Farhatullah Babar told the Dawn on Saturday. A similar impression was given by senior officials of the foreign office, who said the concerns would not go unnoticed and would be taken up at an “appropriate level”.

What did Obama announce that so worries Islamabad? The US President announced several incentives, including an increase in aid to Pakistan, the passage of legislation on the reconstruction opportunity zones and a commitment to democracy in the country, but at the same time he was quite ominous in his tone when he categorically said that there would be no “blank cheques” for Pakistan.

What does this mean? It means that, although Washington sees Pakistan as a vital piece in its strategy to fight the “war on terror” in Afghanistan, it is becoming increasingly frustrated at the ambiguous role of the Pakistan authorities and in particular the role of the Pakistan secret services (the ISI), a shadowy state within a state, which is well known to have close links with al Qaeda and the Taliban and is secretly protecting and encouraging terrorist organizations for its own sinister purposes.

The response of the Pakistan foreign office was guarded because this is an explosive issue and one that lies at the heart of the crisis in the Pakistan state. Sources in the foreign office stated: “There are pretty big problems in the policy about which our leadership is not speaking.” They have good reason to keep silent!

American frustration was shown by recent declarations by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who urged Pakistan's powerful intelligence service to cut contacts with extremists in Afghanistan, which he called an “existential threat” to Pakistan itself. Gates was merely saying what everybody has always known: that Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence has had links with jihadi terrorist groups “for a long time, as a hedge against what might happen in Afghanistan if we were to walk away or whatever,” as he told Fox News Sunday.

“What we need to do is try and help the Pakistanis understand these groups are now an existential threat to them and we will be there as a steadfast ally for Pakistan,” Gates said. “They can count on us and they don't need that hedge,” he said, citing the ISI's links specifically to the Al Qaeda-linked Haqqani militant network and to the forces of Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

The Pentagon chief's comments came after President Barack Obama on Friday put Pakistan at the centre of the fight against al Qaeda with a new strategy to commit thousands more troops and billions of dollars to the Afghan war.

“He clearly understands this is a very tough fight and that we're in it until we're successful, that al Qaeda is no longer a threat to the United States and that we are in no danger of either Afghanistan or the western part of Pakistan being a base for Al Qaeda,” Gates added.

America is Losing in Afghanistan

It is now an open secret that the war in Afghanistan is going badly. Western casualties are constantly rising. Obama is trying to extricate the US forces from Iraq in order to reinforce the US military presence in Afghanistan. Asked about a New York Times report that US military commanders had pressed Obama for even more troops, the defense secretary said: “The president has approved every single soldier that I have requested of him. […] And the reality is there already are a lot of troops there. This will bring us, when all is said and done, to 68,000 troops plus another 35,000 or so Europeans and other partners.”

Obama is now exerting intense pressure to extract more troops from its unwilling European allies. Washington is also demanding more civilian experts and police trainers. But no matter how many troops are sent to Afghanistan, the likelihood of victory remains a mirage. With every bomb dropped on an Afghan village the hatred of the foreign invader grows more intense. The government of Kabul is seen as a puppet government of collaborators and corrupt gangsters. On the other hand, the Taliban have an endless supply of recruits from Pakistan, plenty of money from opium smuggling and secure havens in the tribal areas across the border with Pakistan.

This explains the public attacks on the ISI from Washington, which have provoked angry denials from the Pakistan State Security. The fact is that the ISI was actively encouraged by Washington to support al Qaeda and the Taliban in the past, when these reactionary bandits were used to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. This encouraged sections in the tops of the Pakistan army (and especially the ISI) in the belief that they would have a free hand in Afghanistan, which, in effect, would be under Pakistan’s control. They developed the notorious theory of “defence in depth”, which meant that Afghanistan would serve Pakistan as a kind of fallback position in the event of another war with India (a subject these elements are constantly obsessed with).

Ever since the US imperialists have changed the line and declared war on their former allies, al Qaeda and the Taliban, the ISI and other reactionary elements in the Pakistan General Staff have not concealed their displeasure. They have never abandoned the theory of “defence in depth”, nor their ambitions in Afghanistan. They have never broken their links with al Qaeda and the Taliban, which are not motivated by religious fanaticism, but rather the fanaticism to get rich by dirty means.

As Pakistan’s economy collapses and the masses are faced with poverty and hunger, prominent citizens of Pakistan are growing fabulously rich on the proceeds of the black economy, especially the lucrative drug trade. The so-called Islamic fundamentalists are really gangsters and lumpens, linked to the drug mafia and transport mafia that trades in human misery. This is big business on a vast scale, which involves massive corruption that leads all the way up to the top – including the tops of the army. This is the cancer that is gnawing at the entrails of the Pakistan state and destroying it slowly from within. That is why Gates talks about an “existential problem”.

A few months ago, a Pakistani general, Ameer Faisal Alvi, a serving officer in the Pakistan army’s campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Tribal Areas of Waziristan, and head of the elite Special Services Group (Commandos), sent a letter to the Chief of Staff, general Pervaiz Ashraf Kayani, denouncing the fact that generals of the Pakistan army were actively collaborating with al Qaeda and the Taliban. As a result, he was dismissed from the army. After this, he sent another letter to the Chief of Staff, in which he named the generals concerned. It was an act of personal bravery for which he paid a high price. On November 26, 2008 he was murdered in broad daylight on the streets of Islamabad.

Splits in the State

This explains why the rulers of Pakistan are afraid to talk about certain matters. The rottenness of Pakistan capitalism has extended to the highest levels of the state, army and government, to the extent that it threatens complete breakdown. Last week a US think tank predicted that if something were not done soon, the state could break down in six months! All these events are a striking confirmation of the Marxist analysis of the state that was put forward in the recent congress of The Struggle.

The murder of Benazir Bhutto was an indication of the sinister forces at work in Pakistani society. The western media falsely portray this as the rise of “Islamic fundamentalism”, when in reality these terrorist organizations are small minority groups composed of lumpens and bandits manipulated by the powerful drug mafia and the state. Although it was a lumpen fanatic who pulled the trigger, the real murderers of Benazir Bhutto were the ISI. There is no doubt that the same people were behind the Mumbai atrocity and the killing of the Sri Lanka cricketers. And there is no doubt that the same invisible hand is behind today’s bloody events, which are meant as an answer to the threat from Washington.

The idea that the fundamentalists enjoy massive support in Pakistan society is a blatant lie and a slander against the people of Pakistan. These reactionary gangs were originally created by US imperialism under the brutal Zia dictatorship and were nurtured, financed, armed and trained by the Pakistan state. Without the backing of the ISI they are nothing. That is why the US imperialists are now demanding that the Pakistan government take action against the ISI.

This is very easy to say from the safety of an air-conditioned office in Washington, but not so easy to put into practice on the streets of Islamabad. The ISI is entrenched after decades of a pampered and privileged existence. It is linked by a thousand links with corrupt government officials and politicians at the highest level, to organized crime on a grand scale, to the drug and transport mafia, to the religious fanatics in the madrassas that turn out brainwashed fanatics prepared to act as the murderous instruments of reaction, and to the murky underworld of jihadi terrorism.

Another section of the state has different interests. They are in the pockets of US imperialism, whose interests they serve like a dog licking the hand of its master. They bow and scrape before their bosses in Washington, who treat Pakistan as if it were America’s backyard. The conflict at the heart of these two antagonistic wings of the ruling class is explained by antagonistic material interests.

As far as the working class of Pakistan is concerned, there is nothing to choose between these two rival groups of gangsters. The Pakistan Marxists will fight US imperialism and oppose its criminal actions in Afghanistan, Waziristan and Pukhtunkhwa. But we will do so with our own methods and under our own banner, which is not the black flag of fundamentalist reaction but the red flag of socialist revolution.

Only by taking power into their own hands can the working class overthrow the rotten, diseased state of the exploiters and build a new state – a democratic workers’ state in which the lives and destinies of the people will be determined by the masses themselves. That is the only way forward to lead Pakistan out of the present nightmare and into the realm of socialism and freedom.

Lahore, March 30, 2009

RENEGADE EYE

Pakistan: Swat - A Paradise in Peril

By Adam Pal in Lahore
Thursday, 05 February 2009

Swat is one of the most beautiful valleys of Pakistan but today it is being ravaged by the barbarism of fanatics decrying the rottenness of a decaying capitalist system. Today the Taliban are governing this beautiful valley. Sections of the Pakistan Army under the guise of a military operation against them are in fact supporting this fundamentalist reaction. On top of this, the aggression of the imperialist forces in the name of the so-called "war on terror" propels these forces further.



Map of the North-Western Frontier Province in Pakistan with Swat highlighted. Made by Pahari Sahib.

The beautiful valley of Swat, which was a few years back a tourist's paradise with its eye-catching landscapes, is now a haven for criminal gangsters joining the Taliban forces. In Lower Swat one can see terraced fields, startlingly green rice paddies, abundant fruit orchards, and views of snow-capped peaks. In Upper Swat the river narrows into turbulent gorges, the mountains tower above and pine forests cling defiantly to the slopes. It is an excellent place for fishing and climbing. For the historian and amateur archaeologist it has several thousand archaeological sites spanning 5,000 years of history waiting to be explored. The other side of the picture, however, is the fact that the 1.7 million population of this picturesque valley is living a life of hell. Nearly 700,000 have emigrated to other places or have been forced to move away.

The Taliban forces led by Fazlullah are imposing the most barbaric laws on the local people and are slaughtering the innocents for not obeying their obscurantist orders. Fear reigns supreme. The Islamic militants have banned girls' education, forced women indoors and have resorted to murder to enforce their version of Islam.

The Green Chowk (Crossing) in Mingora, which is the main city in the valley is now called the Zibah khana Chowk (Slaughter Crossing) as one or two slaughtered bodies of innocent people of the valley are hanged their daily from an electricity pole. A note accompanies the body which says that whoever dares remove the body before sunset will get the same treatment.



Fundamentalist forces are terrorising the beutiful valley of Swat. Photo by Scott Christian.

These Islamic fundamentalists regularly blast government girls' schools and shops which sell Audio and Video CD's. Also the barbers are slaughtered if they shave anybody in the valley. Many other similar barbaric acts take place every other day.

According to the Dawn of February 3, 2009: "The journey upwards from Mardan these days is forbidding. The entire route is a picture of utter desolation. Fear of the unknown has overtaken a place fabled for its fertile fields and majestic mountains. Even a flying visit is enough to fill one with a sense of foreboding that religious extremists would overrun the valley before long. Most people, especially those living in urban areas, seem to have lost the will to live."

The Pakistan Army has started an operation named "Rah-i-Haq" against the Taliban forces, but in actual fact it is aimed against the civilian population and is giving strength to these forces of black reaction. This operation was launched on July 29, 2007. At the launching of this operation the spokesperson of Pakistan Army Brigadier Javed Nasir had said that there are only 700 to 800 Taliban in the Valley and that they could easily handle them.

Now the Operation is in its third phase with two full divisions of the Pakistan Army, the 17th and 37th, in the Valley and yet the conflict is nowhere near an end. According to a conversation with a reporter of Aaj TV in Batkhela, the presence of 45,000 army personnel in the valley would be more than enough to handle the less than 1000 Taliban fighters. The Army is using Gunship helicopters, heavy artillery and mortar guns. But still the Taliban are holding the key areas in the Valley.

The main leader of these fundamentalists, Maulana Fazlullah, systematically uses FM Radios to convey his orders and sermons to the people of the Valley. Four FM Radio channels are being run in separate areas in which messages of the Maulana are conveyed by his deputies. Separate broadcasts are being aired for the Malakand and Shamozai, Matta and Khawaza Khela areas in Swat.



Taliban forces in Swat are imposing taxes on local traders and businessmen. Photo by Scott Christian.

Despite the presence of the Army, the Taliban are spreading their message in the same way as they did, and still do, in Swat. The medium of the message is fear. In fact, fear itself is the message.

In Malakand Shah Dauran a deputy of Fazlullah can be heard in the evenings from around 8.30pm to 11.00pm. In his broadcast Shah Dauran first points out various people in the area who are not obeying obscurantist Islamic laws and announces punishments for them. These punishments are carried out the very next day which include death. Then he announces the names of those who have confessed their mistakes and have come back to the "right" path. In the end there is a segment of "Good News" in which news of bomb blasts and suicide attacks on various places is given. The programme ends with songs of holy war. Shah Dauran has also given his mobile phone numbers where he can be reached and complaints can be placed.

The transmission of radio channels, the continuous supply of arms, ammunition and strategic support for the Taliban and their minimal losses clearly show that sections of the Pakistan Army and Intelligence agencies have no intention of curbing this savagery, rather they support them by all means.

According to newspaper reports, so far 207 Islamic fundamentalist militants have been killed while 325 security personnel and 2000 civilians have lost their lives. According to the Dawn newspaper, "The Maulana's followers hold sway over no less than 80 percent of the Swat valley."

Taliban forces in Swat are also imposing taxes on local traders and businessmen and are operating their own courts. Also mobile companies are paying Rs 30,000 (US$400) per month for each mobile tower in the valley to the Taliban for security. The civilian population is also being charged taxes in the form of cash payments or in the form of arms.

These Taliban forces are actually local criminal elements who have been sponsored by the ISI (Pakistani secret services) and the American CIA to disguise themselves as fundamentalists and ravage this beautiful area only to threaten the workers and peasants of Pushtoonkhwa and curb any form of resistance against this exploitative system. Also this area has become a safe haven for criminals of the whole region and they are coming in big numbers to take their share of the plunder.



The main leader of the fundamentalists, Maulana Fazlullah, systematically uses radio broadcasts to convey his orders and sermons to the people of the Valley. Photo by salimswati.

According to the local people most of these are seasoned kidnappers, car lifters and dacoits who are now part of the Taliban forces. One of the commanders of Fazlullah in Swat is Rahimdad, alias Kuch, who was a famous inter-provincial car thief a few years back.

It has been reported that when a Union Council Administrator in Dheri, Malakand, Ahmed Hussain Khan went to Swat for some personal reasons he met there with Bacha who has been known as a hardened criminal in the area and been to jail in Batkhela several times. Ahmed Hussein Khan told the press that Bacha told him that he is now really enjoying things more since becoming a part of the Taliban. He reportedly gave Khan US$12,000 and some jewellery to handover to Bacha's brother. Also these criminals are deeply involved in drug trade.

It is common knowledge that the secret service agencies like the ISI are deeply involved in the methods, strategy and planning of these fundamentalist forces. Apparently all this destruction of homes, schools, shops and the imposing of reactionary laws may seem as utter madness and yet there is a method in this madness. These forces are trying their best to gather support of the primitive layers of society to propel their agenda further and move forward into the urbanized areas. They seldom attack petty criminals like pickpockets, robbers and brothel houses, so as to gain the sympathy of these primitive layers. But the indignation of the common people towards these hardened criminals is increasing every day.

These reactionary fundamentalists are trying their best to destroy the centuries old cultural and aesthetic aspects of this society. One beautiful aspect of this culture is the classical folk dance which is performed at weddings and other cultural ceremonies. The artists living in the valley are renowned all over the region and have been associated with this profession for many generations. The most famous of all these artistes are from Bhand Mohalla (artistes locality) in Mingora city where not only dancers but also musicians have been living for centuries. The Taliban not only have destroyed this locality but they have also slaughtered Shabnam, a famous dancer. She was popular with men and women alike. Four other dancers were also killed. Now most of the dancers and musicians have migrated to Karachi and other cities and are living a terrible life. The barbarism in Swat is spilling over into the neighbouring areas, especially Malakand which is a gateway to the whole region.

The Malakand agency lies at a strategically important position as it acts as a gateway to Swat, Dir, Chitral and Bajaur. It is in the Lower Swat region amidst high mountains thick with evergreen olive and pine trees. It stands at the exit of a pass known as the Malakand Pass or Darrah Malakand.

The Taliban have threatened the official courts in Batkhela, the main city of Malakand, demanding they stop their functioning within 15 days. Also army check points are starting to appear on the main road, which actually heralds the onslaught of Taliban forces.

CD shop owners are being threatened and orders are being announced from FM radio to obey the orders of the Taliban or face dire consequences. The sporadic killing of innocent people and barbaric acts of intimidating women are already taking place in the area. Lawyers have been warned not to appear in court and that "Whoever will appear before court will be our enemy". Already they have set up 73 Sharia courts to administer "speedy justice". These courts summon people by phone, threatening violators with death.

Madrassahs

Madrassahs are mushrooming these days in every nook and corner of Swat and Malakand where poor people send their children to study. These Madrassahs became a source of income in the period of the Afghan Jihad (against Soviet forces) when millions of dollars were pumped in by the American government. These dollars are still coming in, mainly through the drug trade and other criminal activities. Hundreds of children are being sent there by parents who cannot afford the food and clothing of these children. These Madrassahs are being used by the ISI to recruit suicide bombers.

The suicide bombers from these Madrassahs are also now being used to sell services to those who can pay hefty amounts to settle their personal disputes. One such bomber was used in the Bhakkar bomb blast in South Punjab to settle a personal score by a local who had bought this suicide bomber for 12 million rupees. According to some local people some suicide bombers are also instructed to blow them up as a trial for prospective buyers!



Madrassahs, where poor families send their children, are being used by the secret service to recruit suicide bombers. Photo by *Muhammad* on Flickr.

This "industry" of terrorism has been flourishing quite rapidly since the 'War on Terrorism' was started by the Bush administration in America. The sale of arms and suicide bomber jackets is helping to expand this "industry" and new methods are being developed to increase the sales of various forms of terror.

Drone attacks by American and NATO forces in the Tribal areas are aggravating this war and are keeping the sale of bombs, fighter planes and drones growing. A Station Headquarter Officer in Malakand has claimed in the press that "if given a chance I can end the rein of the Taliban of Swat in one week, otherwise I may be hanged".

With the rottenness of capitalist system and a crisis-ridden economy, the multinationals and industrialists in Pakistan may use these forces as a threat to curb workers' rights and to threaten them if they dare hold any protests. In Swat and the adjacent areas, political activities are almost banned and the activists of left political parties are being targeted. Some have been killed and others have migrated to Islamabad or Peshawar.

No mainstream political party has any agenda or solution to this conflict and they are all capitulating, though reluctantly, to these forces. One of the main reasons for this is their compromise with this rotten capitalist system and their slavish attitude to the Army generals and the imperialist masters.

The ANP, the Pushtoon nationalist party, is currently in power in Pushtoonkhwa, along with the PPP as a coalition partner. Also in the Federal government both are collaborating with each other, along with the Islamic fundamentalist party JUI-F. Neither the PPP nor the ANP can offer a way out of this crisis which is a threat to humanity itself; rather they are proposing various ways of compromise with these reactionary forces. In Malakand, which is traditionally a stronghold of the PPP, all the MPs elected in the elections last year have fled from the area.

The only force that is giving not only resistance to this dogmatic force but also offering a solution, are the comrades of the IMT in Pushtoonkhwa. Working in the most perilous conditions, they are patiently explaining that the root cause of all this menace is the disintegrating capitalist system which is imposing these forces on humanity.

They are also encouraging people to raise their voice against unemployment, price hikes and other basic issues like healthcare and education. The inability of the system to provide these basic necessities is not due to any lack of resources but to the lack of planning which can only be done under Socialism.

The comrades of the IMT are working inside the PPP and also in trade unions of various departments and are also organizing the unemployed youth of the area on the platform of the BNT (Unemployed Youth Movement) to wage a political struggle against these reactionary forces. In this struggle, imperialism, the Pakistani state apparatus, the Army and the Taliban are all against them. And yet, the forces of revolutionary socialism are growing in the area. This can be seen from the fact that in the year 2008 after the general elections of February the only political activities carried out in Malakand were those of the comrades of IMT. They celebrated May Day, a big demonstration against price hikes on June 2 and also a rally in support of the Venezuelan and Bolivian revolutions, and another against US aggression in September in Batkhela when they burnt US flags.

The masses are learning fast from their own experiences and are listening to the ideas of socialism. That is why the only threat the Taliban really feel are from the genuine forces of socialism. During the Friday prayers sermons are given in Malakand and Swat condemning the ideas of Karl Marx and Lenin and attacking the theory of surplus value to warn the people to keep away from these ideas. In spite of all this, the struggle of the comrades is still going on amid serious threats but they are waging a serious fight.

When the masses will begin to move they will smash these forces of barbarism and will stand up against all aggression of the State and fundamentalist forces. The movement of hundreds of thousands of poor and downtrodden peasants and workers will not listen to sermons or feel threatened by weapons but will move on to challenge this system. There is a history and tradition of such movements in this region, especially during the 1968-69 revolution. A volcanic eruption from the depths of society will shake the standing army from inside and the ferment in the rank and file will grow to become a revolt.

The comrades are patiently explaining the ideas of revolutionary Marxism and have remained in the area against all odds and threats to their lives. In the coming period they will be able to lead the masses towards the complete transformation of society. On this basis and united with the movement of workers, youth and peasants of other areas of Pakistan, will lay the basis for a move towards a socialist revolution in Pakistan.

RENEGADE EYE

Dancing Girls of Lahore Strike over 'Taliban' Law

Patrick Cockburn and Issam Ahmed in Lahore
Friday, 12 December 2008

The dancing girls of Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan, are on strike in protest against the tide of Talibanisation that is threatening to destroy an art form that has flourished since the Mughal empire.

The strike, which is supported by the theatres where they perform, was sparked by the decision of Lahore High Court last month to ban the Mujra, the graceful and elaborate dance first developed in the Mughal courts 400 years ago, on the grounds that it is too sexually explicit.

"The Mujra by its very nature is supposed to be a seductive dance," says Badar Alam, a cultural expert. He recalls that attempts were made to ban it during the 1980s. "Gradually, it returned to commercial theatre, mostly by paying off officials. The question remains: does the government have the right to engage in moral policing?"

The government and High Court in particular have no doubt about their right to do just that. They have tried to encourage "family friendly" dances, but once-packed theatres are now near empty, despite dropping their prices from 300 rupees to 25 rupees a seat.

In the face of the strike and the lack of enthusiasm for alternative entertainment, the court has suspended its ban. It has, however, ordered dancers to cover their necks with shawls and wear shoes (they used to dance barefoot but the court deemed that too erotic). "Do they expect girls to dance in a burkha?" asks stage manager Jalal Mehmoud. "Mujra has been going on for so many years it is part of our culture."

The dancers are also distressed by the situation. "Theatre needs dance like food needs water," says Rabia, a dancer and actress. "Some girls were making up to 15,000 rupees in one night. Hundreds of these girls from poorer backgrounds will be out of the work if the crowds do not come back."

The ban on dancing is a symptom of a more dangerous trend in Pakistani society. "If the government engages in moral policing," says Badar Alam, "it gives vigilantes licence to do the same. It fuels intolerance and de-secularisation by violence and intimidation and opens the door to extreme Jihadi Islamic movements."

Over the past few months, there has been a crescendo of violence in support of fundamentalist morality in Lahore. In the middle-class Garhi Shahu neighbourhood, young men and women used to meet in fruit-juice bars. There was nothing particularly salacious going on but, two months ago, three bombs exploded among them, killing one man and wounding others.

One bomb went off in a juice bar called Disco, where Mohammed Zubair Khan said he doubted if his customers would ever come back. "Everybody's frightened," said Saeed Ahmed Afiz, the owner of a another bar. Asked what he thought of those who had ruined his business, he declared surprisingly: "They were not terrorists because they did not kill anybody. They did the right thing." Asked about the man who died, Mr Afiz added unfeelingly: "Maybe he was just here to see the show."

A striking feature of those suffering persecution from fundamentalists is not their fear but their acceptance that, if they had encouraged immorality, they deserved punishment. The main centre for selling CDs and DVDs in Lahore is Hall Road. But when one of the tough-looking shopkeepers received a threatening letter accusing him and others of selling risqué films, the mood was not one of defiance, but of submission. The traders heaped up the forbidden DVDs and CDs in the middle of Hall Road and made a giant bonfire. "I swear we sell no pornography," said one nervously.

RENEGADE EYE

The Mumbai Massacre

By Alan Woods
Tuesday, 02 December 2008

Last week the world was stunned by the bloody scenes of carnage in the aftermath of the terrorist onslaught across Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The attack, which began late Wednesday night extended over ten different sites in India's financial capital. It struck Mumbai's two best-known luxury hotels and other landmarks in the city of 18 million. It was carried out by a small group of gunmen, who had apparently arrived by sea, split into groups to attack multiple targets across the city, including the main railway station and a hospital. TV channels described the attacks as "India's 9/11."

The massacre was not brought to a close until Saturday morning. Finally, two and a half days, the final standoff at the Taj Mahal hotel was over, as Indian commandos took the building by force. The Taj, filled with terrified civilians, was a grim sight. "Bodies were strewn all over the place, and there was blood everywhere," a commando said. "Terrorists are far more advanced today. We didn't realize that they had satellite phones for communication or that they would be so advanced and use incendiary bombs," one commando said. The siege was particularly troubling because "they didn't spare women or children." To date, 188 people have been killed and nearly 300 injured.

Azam Amir Kasab, 21, the only terrorist to survive, told authorities that he was ordered to kill "until the last breath," and that the attacks involved just 10 terrorists, who hoped to kill 5,000 people, targeting mostly "whites, preferably Americans and British," according to a report in The Mail on Sunday. It seems the operation was carefully planned six months ago. The terrorists reportedly posed as students during a visit to Mumbai a month ago to familiarize themselves with the city's roads and to film the "strike locations."

Indian investigators said today the terrorists underwent months of commando training in Pakistan. The latest report from Reuters this morning underlined the hypothesis of a Pakistan connection, which is universally accepted in India. Two senior investigators told Reuters on condition of anonymity that evidence from the interrogation of Azam Amir Kasav clearly showed that Pakistani extremists had a hand in the attack. The clean-shaven, 21-year-old with fluent English was photographed during the attack wearing a black t-shirt emblazoned with the Versace logo. He has said his team took orders from "their command in Pakistan," police officials said.

According to a police officer close to the interrogation, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, the terrorists were trained by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, under the direction of a former member of the Pakistani army. Another senior Indian officer told Reuters: "They underwent training in several phases, which included training in handling weapons, bomb making, survival strategies, survival in a marine environment and even dietary habits".

U.S. and Indian officials are investigating the possibility that the attackers arrived off the coast of Mumbai in a large ship and then boarded smaller boats before initiating their attack, the paper said. A US counterterrorism official said there was strong evidence that Lashkar-e-Taiba had a "maritime capability" and would have been able to mount the sophisticated operation in Mumbai.

Indian security officers believe many of the gunmen may have reached the city using a rubber dinghy found near the site of the attacks. On Saturday the Indian navy said it was investigating whether a trawler found drifting off the coast of Mumbai, with a bound corpse on board, was used in the attack. Navy spokesman Capt. Manohar Nambiar said the trawler, named Kuber, had been found Thursday and was brought to Mumbai. Officials said they believe the boat had sailed from a port in the neighbouring state of Gujarat. Indian authorities stopped a cargo ship off the western coast of Gujarat that had sailed from Saudi Arabia and handed it over to police for investigation.

A Reactionary Provocation

The authorship of these atrocities has still not been established, although a little-known group calling itself Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility early on. There are many theories but few hard facts. But one thing is quite clear: This was a completely reactionary provocation, which benefits only the most counterrevolutionary forces in Indian and Pakistan society.

The massacre has struck a heavy blow against the moves towards improving relations between India and Pakistan. In the last few days the streets of Mumbai and other Indian cities have witnessed angry demonstrations with some people demanding war with Pakistan. Whoever was behind the attack must have anticipated and desired this response.

Inevitably the Indian authorities and some other Indian security analysts are pointing an accusing finger at Pakistan. Pakistan has denied that its government had anything to do with the attacks. These denials are almost certainly true, although they do not preclude Pakistani involvement. However, the possibility that the Mumbai atrocities were planned and orchestrated within India itself cannot be discounted. India is no stranger to terrorist violence. It has been shaken repeatedly by terror attacks in recent years. Mumbai itself has been hit by terror attacks before.

In March 1993, Muslim underworld figures linked to Pakistani terrorists allegedly carried out a series of bombings on Mumbai's stock exchange. Those attacks killed 257 people and wounded more than 1,100. On the evening of 11 July 2006 there was a series of eight bomb explosions at seven locations on local trains and stations in Mumbai during peak traveling hours. 52 people were killed in those bombings. In July 2007 a series of seven blasts ripped through railway trains and commuter rail stations, killing about 190 commuters.

India has witnessed a series of terror attacks in recent months. In May, at least 80 people were killed by a series of blasts in the tourist city of Jaipur. In July, about 50 were killed by a series of explosions in the western city of Ahmedabad. Last month, about 60 people died in Assam, in India's north-east, in similar circumstances. These attacks are usually blamed on Muslim militants, but Hindu fanatics have also been involved in bloody terrorist acts. In recent weeks, police have rounded up 10 members of what they say is its first Hindu terror cell. Among those arrested are a serving army officer and a Hindu priest.

The arrest of an Indian army officer adds a new element into the equation. There are elements in both the Pakistan and Indian army who have never been reconciled to the peace process and fear being sold out by America. The Islamic extremists get most publicity, but there are plenty of Hindu, Jewish and Christian extremists too. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is based on Hindu chauvinism and there are many more sinister elements to the right of the BJP: the RSS, VHP and the Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva). They have links with the armed forces and intelligence services in India that mirror the links of the jihadi groups with the Pakistan armed forces and the ISI.

The conditions of the masses in both India and Pakistan are increasingly desperate. Unemployment, poverty, rising food and energy prices - all this makes life for millions of people unbearable. In India the election of the Congress government gave rise to hopes that were soon dashed. In Pakistan, too, the election of the PPP government has solved nothing for the masses. Both Manmohan Singh and Zardari are in trouble and the right wing opposition in both countries wish to take full advantage of the situation.

In the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks there has been sharp criticism of India's alleged lack of preparedness and the conduct of its intelligence services. The sharpest attacks came from the domestic press. This noisy campaign is directed against the ruling Congress government. The growing fury of the masses is also directed against Congress, which is blamed for the intelligence lapses many Indians believe let these gunmen kill 188 people and besiege India's financial capital for three days.

Already two top politicians from the ruling party have resigned, and Congress faces defeat in a series of state elections. The bomb attacks on Indian cities this year - with threats that more would follow - benefit the right wing opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. They have given the chauvinist a stick to beat the ruling party in the run-up to elections due by May. All this is undermining Congress' grip on power, which was already shaky. The latest issue of The Economist writes:

"India's friends and neighbours can hope for a measured reaction, but they should not assume it. After an attack on its national parliament in 2001, India mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops on the border with Pakistan. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in power, routinely accuses its successor, the Congress party, of being soft on terrorism. The desperate spectacle in Mumbai could damage Congress's prospects in pending state polls and even cost it the next general election, which must be held by May. The BJP is now choosing its words carefully but a front-page newspaper advert, presumably commissioned before the Mumbai attacks, accused Congress of being ‘incapable and unwilling' to fight terror; a sentiment illustrated with a large splatter of blood."

Is it possible that this latest provocation was organized and planned on Indian soil in order to sabotage the thaw between India and Pakistan and create a wave of chauvinism and war hysteria that would benefit the Indian reactionaries and undermine the Congress government? Such a hypothesis cannot be ruled out. However, the pattern of Hindu extremist violence is very different to what we saw last week. These elements specialize in whipping up mobs for pogroms against the Moslems in India's cities and villages.

This attack - a combination of grenades and automatic weapons - was quite different. The choice of targets underlines the possibility that this was a group connected with Islamic fundamentalism. The fact that they singled out a Jewish centre and killed Israeli hostages (including a US-based rabbi and his wife) is significant. The targeting of Jews lends support to the view that the attack was organized by Islamic fanatics. There is no history of animosity towards Jews on the part of Hindu extremists.

Similarly, the fact that they singled out British and American people links this attack to Islamic fundamentalism. Witnesses said the attackers had specifically rounded up people with US and British passports. The way in which the massacre was carried out is in line with the well-known methods of al-Qaeda. There was no warning message and the gunmen killed men, women and children without mercy. They intended to kill as many people as possible, as in the 9/11 attacks, the London bombings and the atrocity in Madrid.

The other significant point is that the gunmen were well-prepared and well armed. Their detailed knowledge of the targets suggests that they had reconnoitred at least some targets ahead of time. They were also carrying large bags of almonds to keep up their energy. This was no bunch of amateur fanatics but a professionally-trained, well-organized group. "It's obvious they were trained somewhere. ... Not everyone can handle the AK series of weapons or throw grenades like that," an unidentified member of India's Marine Commando unit told reporters. He said the men were "very determined and remorseless" and ready for a long siege. One backpack they found had 400 rounds of ammunition inside. The question is: who trained them and where?

In the past, U.S. and Indian intelligence services have used communications intercepts to tie Kashmiri militants to terrorist strikes. According to one Indian intelligence official, during the siege the militants have been using non-Indian cell phones and receiving calls from outside the country. The implication is that these calls were made to Pakistan.

Indignation in Pakistan

Lashkar-e-Taiba has denied any involvement in the Mumbai killings and condemned the attacks. The chief of the United Jihad Council, an umbrella group for over a dozen Kashmiri militant groups, also denied any role in the Mumbai attack. "We very strongly condemn the attacks on innocent civilians in Mumbai and say it categorically that none of the Kashmiri freedom fighting groups has anything to do with it," group leader Syed Salahuddin said. Pakistan has asked for evidence of the involvement of anyone in Pakistan, but India, it seems, has so far not supplied any. Pakistan denies the allegations and says it only ever gave moral and diplomatic support for Kashmiri freedom fighters. But the Indians will greet this claim with scepticism.

The Pakistani media immediately protested that Islamabad should not be held responsible for the carnage in India's financial hub and the peace process should not be derailed. Pakistan's leading dailies have warned against the "blame-game", arguing that it would hamper the ongoing efforts to normalize relations between the two countries. "India gives Pakistan a dirty look," said a headline in the Daily News, while another paper said Indian intelligence was under fire and seeking to lay the blame elsewhere. The Dawn argued that the two countries "without apportioning blame on each other should cooperate in the investigation to make them productive."

"Although one can understand the anger and concern which is widely felt, one would still advice the exercise of restraint in this hour of crisis," the paper said. "There is need for confidence-building between the two countries." The same tone of sweetness and light was adopted by the Pakistan Daily Times, which said that both India and Pakistan faced the same threat of terrorism and needed to work out a "cooperative strategy". This is very much in line with the views of Washington, which wishes to avoid a confrontation between Islamabad and New Delhi at all costs. Unfortunately, the tensions between the two countries have a logic of their own that may be difficult to control.

The condemnation of the atrocity in Pakistan's official circles has been swift and unusually outspoken. Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari promised that he would take immediate and strong measures if proof was provided of Pakistani involvement. He warned India on Saturday against any "over-reaction" after the militant attacks in Mumbai and vowed the "strictest" action if Pakistani involvement was proved.

"Whoever is responsible for the brutal and crude act against the Indian people and India are looking for reaction," Zardari said in an interview with Indian CNN-IBN television. "We have to rise above them and make sure ourselves, yourself and world community guard against over-reaction." These are strong words and go far further than any concessions made to India by the leaders of Pakistan in the past.

The reason for this is twofold: firstly, Zardari mortally fears a war with India that would certainly lead to his downfall in the near future. Secondly, he and his government are entirely subordinate to the interests of Washington, which he hopes will pay his bills and keep his bankrupt country afloat. "This is a world threat and all the more reason we have to stand up against this threat together," he said, echoing Mr. Bush's mantra of the global war on terror.

The involvement of the official rulers of Pakistan in this affair may therefore be safely discounted. There remain, however, the unofficial rulers of Pakistan, who in reality hold much more power in their hands than the elected government and President. We refer to the ISI, Pakistan's sinister Intelligence Services that constitute a state within the state, has close contacts with the Taliban and al-Qaeda and is constantly involved in all kinds of shady activities beyond the control of the government, the foreign office and judiciary.

It is quite clear that elements in the ISI were behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. They would like to destabilize the Zardari government, which they see as too close to the Americans. They would like to halt the actions of the Pakistan army against the Taliban in the tribal areas. The ISI hates India, and is opposed to the peace negotiations. They therefore had every motive to launch a secret operation aimed at provoking India and simultaneously destabilizing the PPP government. A war with India would be ideal from their point of view, as it would bring the war against the Taliban to an abrupt halt, stir up anti-Indian feeling in the population and create the conditions for a coup that would bring to power the army, the ISI and the Islamic fundamentalists. There are also powerful economic interests involved here. The real motivation of the so-called fundamentalists is not the Koran but the lucrative trade in drugs that has flourished thanks to the war in Afghanistan.

In order to deflect the blame from Islamabad, some Pakistan commentators have advanced the theory that this was the work of Hindu extremists. "Ongoing investigations into some [past] terrorist attacks that were alternately blamed on Indian Muslims and Pakistan have shown that they were actually carried out by a Hindu terrorist network," the Daily Times said. That is perfectly true, but on this occasion the facts do not fit the hypothesis of an attack by Hindu fundamentalists. Every aspect of this massacre points to the jihadis and the ISI that manipulates the fanatics for their own interests.

State Within a State

The Pakistani government on Saturday first said it would send Lieutenant-General Arshad Shujaa, the powerful chief of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), to New Delhi to "help with enquiries". This had apparently been the request of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Then the Pakistani government changed its tune, saying only that it would send "a member of the military's Inter-Services Intelligence agency". Finally, in an abrupt (and unexplained) somersault, Islamabad said that it was unlikely that any Pakistani intelligence officer would be going to India in the near future.

This clearly indicated a crisis. Why was this mission aborted? Government sources said the change came after "reservations in top military circles" over the unprecedented move. "The military leadership was not consulted before an announcement was made to the media regarding the decision to send the ISI chief to India," a senior government official said. "Reservations" is code for a blazing row in which the Pakistan military refused to obey the order of the government to go to India. This little detail is significant and can be explained by the tensions between the government and the ISI.

For many years the army, and particularly ISI, was notorious for making and unmaking politicians, political parties and governments. The ISI political wing was originally established by PPP founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto while he was in power to keep an eye on his political enemies. It later turned against him and participated in his overthrow and judicial murder. The ISI would later turn against his daughter Benazir, first by setting up a political party - the Islamic Jhamoori Ittehad led by Nawaz Sharif - against her in the 1988 elections, and later by plotting to overthrow her government. The ISI was also named in the reported rigging of the 2002 elections.

The creation of the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League (Q) was also the handiwork of the ISI. It systematically worked on politicians in the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and in the PPP to break away and join the new party that was created especially to provide political backing and legitimacy to General (retd.) Musharraf. It was undoubtedly implicated in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The ISI had the support of the CIA, which conspired with it to further the cause of the anti-Soviet Mujahadin in Afghanistan. But when Washington came into conflict with the Taliban and invaded Afghanistan, a rift opened up with the ISI, many of whose leaders have personal interests in Afghanistan and are heavily involved in the drug trade and remain committed to the cause of the Taliban.

Musharraf played a double game, maintaining an uneasy balance between the Americans and the fundamentalists and the ISI. The election of the PPP-led government gave Washington the possibility of strengthening its hold on Islamabad. Under pressure from the Americans, Zardari tried to take over the ISI some months ago but had to back off hastily when the Army showed its teeth. More recently there were reports that the ISI political wing has "either been disbanded or made inactive". Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told journalists that the political wing had been shut down. He called it a "positive development." However, in the same breath, he described the ISI as "a precious national institution" and said it wanted to focus fully on counter-terrorism activities.

These words show how terrified Pakistan's politicians are of the ISI and indicate the limitations of their scope for action in relation to it. Later reports seemed to have confirmed that the "political wing" of the ISI was to be closed down. Not only was the political wing to be disbanded, but the officials working there were said to have been given "other assignments". These "assignments" were linked to counter-intelligence, which was supposed to be the agency's original role. But to place the same officials who have spent years engaged in political intrigue once more in counter-intelligence is merely to shuffle the cards in the same pack. What is to stop these gentlemen engaging in the same murky game of intrigue in their new positions? The answer to this question is fairly straightforward.

The Dawn newspaper commented the ISI should be able to concentrate more on intelligence about terrorist activity not distracted by its political duties. This was naïve in the extreme. In all countries, including the most "democratic", the secret services act like a state within the state. They meddle in politics and spy even on Cabinet Ministers and other political leaders. In a state like Pakistan, where democracy exists only on condition that it accepts an army boot on its neck, to demand that the ISI should not meddle in politics is plain stupid.

The Army Rules

Ever since Pakistan was established as a state, the army has staged a coup every seven years or so. Military dictatorships alternate with weak democratic regimes in a perpetual game of musical chairs. And even when the generals graciously hand over the trappings of government to the civilians, they still expect to exercise a determining influence over policy, monitoring and managing political activities inside and outside the government. The idea that henceforth the agency would refrain from meddling in politics flies in the face of all experience.

One can imagine the anger in the upper echelons of the ISI at this attempt to trim their claws. It may well have been this that sparked off the recent action in Mumbai. In order to embarrass the Zardari government, and to strengthen the hand of the military in general and the intelligence services in particular, what better than to stir up trouble with India, and this take the heat off the ISI and their Taliban allies? The motive was certainly present, as was their ability to carry it out. The ISI secretly sponsors, arms, trains and finances jihadi groups, which it can manipulate for its own sinister purposes, like the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. It would have been a simple matter to dispatch a small suicide mission to Mumbai. The lives of young fanatics are just small change for these gentlemen, and the political and military dividends of provoking a clash with India represent a handsome return on such a modest investment. As the atmosphere of mutual distrust and suspicion grows, so does the risk of an armed clash between the two states. This would mean many more people killed and wounded than those in Mumbai. But war also would mean that the military (and the ISI) would be back in the saddle. And what are a few tens or hundreds of thousands of lives compared to that?

With every day that passes, recriminations are mounting in India and this is generating an increasingly ugly and dangerous anti-Pakistan mood, raising tensions between the nuclear-armed states. New Delhi has not accused the Pakistan government of involvement but has expressed its frustration that Islamabad has been unable or unwilling to prevent militants using its soil to stage terrorist attacks in India.

This situation suits the right wing extremists, religious fanatics and chauvinists on both sides. It also suits the army generals of both countries. There are others too who would like to see another war between India and Pakistan: the arms traders, gangsters and drug barons. There is a link between the fundamentalists, terrorists and criminal gangs involved in gun-smuggling. Above all, a war would serve as a means of diverting the attention of the mass of poor people who are suffering terribly as a result of the crisis. It would undermine the PPP government in Islamabad and the Congress government in New Delhi, preparing the way for more right wing regimes in both countries.

The interests of Imperialism

Although Washington is very interested in India, especially from an economic point of view, in the short term it cannot dispense with Pakistan, whose army is fighting a war against the Taliban in the tribal areas that lie on the frontier with Afghanistan. Therefore the warnings from Islamabad will alarm the United States and other governments with troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan currently has around 100,000 troops in the border areas, and the army is fighting Islamist militants in several tribal regions. The country's support is therefore crucial to efforts to defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan.

Washington must therefore strive to keep both India and Pakistan happy. It does not want a war. The FBI rushed to send a team of agents to India to help investigate, and a second group is on alert if needed. President Bush issued a statement on Friday, saying the wounded were "in his thoughts and prayers": "My administration has been working with the Indian government and the international community as Indian authorities work to ensure the safety of those still under threat. We will continue to cooperate against these extremists who offer nothing but violence and hopelessness." In reality, it is US imperialism - the most counterrevolutionary force on the planet - that offers nothing but violence and hopelessness and is spreading wars and terror throughout the world in defence of its own predatory interests.

President-elect Barack Obama also expressed condolences about what he called "outrageous terrorist attacks in Mumbai," and said he fully supported the Bush administration's efforts to protect US citizens in India:

"The United States must stand with India and all nations and people who are committed to destroying terrorist networks, and defeating their hate-filled ideology," he said in a statement. Senior Bush administration officials met on Friday afternoon for more discussions about the attacks, said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. She said they were focused on "ensuring everything possible is being done to help American citizens affected by these horrible attacks."

In reality, the tears shed in Washington are of the crocodile variety, and crocodiles are very dangerous animals. It was the USA that originally created and nurtured the monster of Islamic fundamentalism as part of its Cold War against the USSR. It was the USA that created Bin Laden and his terrorist gang in their war to expel Russia from Afghanistan. It was the USA that encouraged and armed the Taliban for the same purpose. And it was the USA that created and sustained the criminal dictatorship in Pakistan and worked hand in glove with his Intelligence Agency, the ISI. Now the dog has bit the hand of its master and the master wishes to have the dog put down. But this is easier to say than to do!

Now they are waging a "war on terror" everywhere, which provides them with a convenient excuse to intervene in the internal affairs of any country in the world, to bully, to bomb and to invade with impunity. At present they are waging a bloody war in Afghanistan against their former friends and allies the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This war is killing large numbers of innocent men, women and children every day. But George W. Bush, who is the biggest terrorist in the world, reserves his tears for such cases of terrorism that do not serve his interests.

Barack Obama has not yet taken possession of the Oval Office but is already coming out in his true colours. He has already said that he intends to pull US troops out of Iraq - and send them to fight in Afghanistan. For this purpose he needs the support of the government of Pakistan, and therefore a war between Pakistan and India is the last thing he needs. Pakistan would divert troops to its border with India and away from fighting militants on the Afghan frontier, if tensions erupt in the wake of the attacks on Mumbai, a senior Pakistani security official said on Saturday. "If something happens on that front, the war on terror won't be our priority," the senior security officer told journalists at a briefing. "We'll take out everything from the western border. We won't leave anything there."

This is no idle threat. Pakistan and India have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947. Since both sides now possess nuclear weapons, the danger is very clear. New Delhi said on Sunday it was raising security to a "war level" and had no doubt of a Pakistani link to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But a war would definitely not suit the interests of US imperialism, whose main concern in the area is the energetic prosecution of the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan cannot fight a war on two fronts! If it is fighting India it cannot fight the Taliban. This is the real motivation for Bush's tears and Obama's earnest pleas for Peace.

America's Real Concern

What worries U.S. officials is the possibility of a flare-up in animosity similar to one that occurred after Pakistani militants attacked the Indian parliament in December 2001. Prompted by these fears, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called the foreign minister of India twice, along with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, since the crisis began. "There were very worrying tensions in the region," said Gordon Duguid, a State Department spokesman. "She was calling the president of Pakistan to get his read on how those tensions might be affected."

The Secretary of State downplayed the threat of conflict between two countries, which almost came to war in 2002 after an earlier attack on India's parliament which also was blamed on Pakistani militants: "This is a different relationship than it was a number of years ago. Obviously they share a common enemy because extremists in any form are a threat to the Pakistanis as well as the Indians," Rice said.

The allies of the USA are also trying to calm the Indians down. In its Asian edition, the Financial Times said Indian leaders should not rush to point the finger of blame at foreign powers. "It is far from clear who is behind the 10-pronged assault, the most devastating in a series of attacks over a miserable year for India," the paper said in an editorial.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is clearly terrified that this incident could precipitate a war. He has appealed to India not to punish his country for last week's attacks. He told the Financial Times on Monday. "Even if the militants are linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, who do you think we are fighting?" Officials in Islamabad have warned any escalation would force it to divert troops to the Indian border and away from a U.S.-led campaign on the Afghan frontier. This, and not any humanitarian considerations, is what Washington is worried about.

The Only Solution - Socialist Revolution!

The British government was at one stage said to be investigating whether some of the attackers could be British citizens with links to Pakistan or Kashmir. India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir and there are many Kashmiris living in Britain. Some British newspapers even published articles saying that some of the terrorists came from Bradford. These scandalous statements were made without a single shred of evidence, and were clearly calculated to inflame racist and anti-Moslem sentiments in the population. Later official statements denied that any of the terrorists were from the United Kingdom. This shows how terrorist acts serve the aims of the reactionaries and imperialists of all countries.

The other theory is that this is the latest incident in a sustained covert war against India in which Pakistan has created and exploited a number of Islamist terrorist groups over more than a decade and a half. The principal focus of this war remains at present the state of Jammu & Kashmir, which India has held captive for over half a century. The people of occupied Kashmir have suffered terrible oppression at the hands of the Indian army. This has engendered a deep feeling of bitterness and desire for revenge among a section of the Kashmiri youth, who are open to be manipulated by sinister forces. This strategy has failed entirely to secure a mass base among India's Muslims, but a handful of recruits - sufficient to sustain a sporadic and, given contemporary technologies, fairly devastating, terrorist campaign - has been made available. This is a bloody blind alley for the people of Kashmir and the youth.

After over half a century, the rival bourgeoisies of India and Pakistan have shown that they are totally incapable of solving the problems of the masses. The people of India, Pakistan, Kashmir, Bangladesh and Nepal are all suffering from the same misery, disease, poverty, illiteracy and homelessness. To the horrors of national and caste oppression, the brutal subjugation of women, slavery and child labour are added the nightmare of pogroms, terrorism and wars.

To the cynical army generals, chauvinist madmen and religious fanatics on both sides war and mutual slaughter are the only solution. But terrorism and wars have not provided any way out for the last 50 years and they will not provide it now. The prospect of an all-out war between two nuclear powers like India and Pakistan present a horrific perspective for the future.

The only way to free Kashmir and solve the problems of the masses is by revolutionary means: through the victory of the socialist revolution in India and Pakistan and the establishment of a Socialist federation of the whole Subcontinent. This revolutionary idea is advancing slowly but surely. The marvellous JKNSF convention on November 29, which united thousands of Kashmiri class fighters under the banner of revolutionary socialism, shows that the best elements of the youth are open to the ideas of Marxism, which is gaining ground against the nationalists and fundamentalists. This is the real way forward for the revolutionary workers and youth of Kashmir, India and Pakistan: the road of socialist revolution that leads to the Socialist Federation of the Subcontinent.

London 2nd December 2008.

RENEGADE EYE