Pakistan and the Occupation of Afghanistan

The following is an excerpt from a longer article, “Pakistan and the Occupation of Afghanistan,” from A World to Win News Service. Another excerpt from that article is available at “Some background on the connection between Pakistan and Afghanistan”.

February 9, 2009. A World To Win News Service. On January 20 Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan blew up five schools in Mingora, once one of the safest areas in Swat, in North-West Pakistan, in an attempt to enforce their growing rule over the northern part of the country. Not long before they had labelled education of girls un-Islamic and forbid it. According to reports, nearly 200 government schools have been destroyed. A similar Islamic grouping, the Pakistani Taleban, also recently banned education for girls, forcing the government to close hundreds more schools in the area for days.

This kind of thing is becoming increasingly common in Pakistan, especially the north. “Elected representatives have fled Swat and many police officers, the target of suicide bomb attacks, have deserted, with the force down in strength from 1,725 to 295.” (Guardian, January 20, 2009) Much of the tribal area in Waziristan north of Peshawar is under the rule of Baitullah Mehssud, a tribal leader said to be close to Al-Qaeda. Most of the Swat Valley, once a tourist area, is increasingly under the control of an Islamic fundamentalist group led by the cleric Maulana Fazlullah.

“Across much of the North-West Frontier Province—around a fifth of Pakistan—women have now been forced to wear the burqa, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards, and over 140 girls’ schools have been blown up or burned down. In the provincial capital of Peshawar, a significant proportion of the city’s elite, along with its musicians, have now decamped to the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi. Meanwhile tens of thousands of ordinary people from the surrounding hills of the semiautonomous tribal belt—the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) that run along the Afghan border—have fled from the conflict zones blasted by missiles from unmanned American Predator drones and strafed by Pakistani helicopter gunships to the tent camps now ringing Peshawar.” (“Pakistan in Peril,” William Dalrymple, New York Review of Books, February 12, 2009)

In fact, even Lahore is now gripped with fear. The hope that this city, the home of many of Pakistan’s secular intellectuals and the heart of the county’s culture and poetry, could keep out of the war has evaporated. The city has now been shaken by a series of bombings and threats. This is a sign of how far deeply the impact of the war once confined to the border areas has already penetrated.

In recent years Pakistan has seen an increasing number of terrorist attacks, suicide bombings and sectarian killings between Sunni and Shia. But now a full-scale war is going on in Northern Pakistan. The Pakistani army has many tens of thousands of soldiers operating in the area. Every day each side claims to have killed tens of its enemies. According to a BBC report (November 2, 2008), it took the Pakistani army six weeks to seize back control of only 13 kilometers of a highway in north Pakistan. When the army took a town in this campaign, it was made possible only after weeks of heavy air bombardment and tank and artillery shelling. When the soldiers finally moved in, the town was completely demolished, adding many thousands more to the hundreds of thousands of people who have become homeless and/or refugees in this war.

As the dimensions of the battlefield have expanded war, as many as a quarter of a million people caught in the crossfire have fled their villages or towns. Ironically, many Pakistanis have sought safety in war-torn Afghanistan.

In November and December, the main road connecting Afghanistan and Pakistan through the strategic Khyber Pass was temporarily closed after fighters attacked a shipping depot and burned cargo trucks meant to supply U.S.-led troops fighting Al-Qaeda. They destroyed a large number of Humvees waiting to be shipped. On February 3, an iron bridge of this road was blown up—only 23 kilometres west of Peshawar, and the road again shut down. Two days later, a checkpoint was assaulted and destroyed. About 80 percent of the supplies needed by the U.S. and its allies travel along this route from the port of Karachi to American bases in Afghanistan.

Another side of the spiralling violence in the region is the U.S. intervention in northern Pakistan, where the CIA is using remote-control missile-equipped pilotless airplanes to attack villages in the name of fighting Al-Qaeda. Each airstrike kills dozens of people. Last August, the U.S. conducted a ground force attack that killed 18 people. Even according to the mainstream press the great majority of those killed are ordinary villagers. Between that time and the end of January U.S. forces based in southern Afghanistan have used these Predator drones to carry out approximately 40 airstrikes in northern Pakistan, and the pace is accelerating. It took Barack Obama only three days after assuming office to demonstrate what he intends to bring the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan—he approved the continuations of these air attacks.

This brief but painful picture of Pakistan looks far different than it did before the 2001 occupation of Afghanistan. The U.S.’s long and cruel Afghanistan campaign in the “war against terrorism” that was supposed to bring “stability” and “democracy” to the region has only poured fuel on the fire and spread the flames of war in a rapidly expanding radius. Hell for the people in Afghanistan and now hell for those in Pakistan—that is the fruit of the occupation.

A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine (aworldtowin.org), a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.

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