Socialist Action /January 2002
India - Pakistan War Tensions Persist
By GERRY FOLEY
The threat of war between India and Pakistan is a "blowback"
for the U.S. rulers on a far greater scale than that of bin Laden and the
Afghan Islamists turning to bite the hand that fed them. It could threaten
a slaughter bigger than anything seen since World War II.
India's pretext for mobilizing its force against Pakistan was a terrorist
attack on the Indian parliament on Dec. 3. The attackers were linked to
the Islamic terrorists fighting Indian forces in the disputed state of Kashmir.
The groups named as responsible for the Dec. 3 attack, the Jaish-e-Mohammed
(Mohammed's Army) and the Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Fighting Force of the Pure)
are mainly active in Kashmir and supported by the Islamist movement in Pakistan.
The country's rulers have obviously given them some degree of support.
The Islamist movement in Pakistan was largely built up by the country's
most powerful dictator, Zia ul-Haq, Washington's stalwart lieutenant in
the region. It was the network of religious schools, madrassas, fostered
by Zia that also spawned the Taliban.
Pakistan's rulers have historically fostered Islamism because religion
is the only basis for the country's existence as a state. The United States
countenanced this because Islamism was also useful to it as a basis for
mobilizing support for anti-communism. During the Cold War, Pakistan was
the major U.S. ally in the region.
Of course, the utility of Islamism for Pakistan's rulers and for the
U.S. has been limited. They do not want anyone to take it to the point of
radical anti-Westernism. But they cannot prevent the masses educated by
the Islamists from drawing conclusions that go against the interests of
the Western imperialists and Pakistan's alliance with them.
Thus, Islamism became a tolerated and well-financed channel of opposition,
into which all sorts of resentments against the effects of imperialist domination
and the corruption of Pakistani politics flowed.
Washington favored the bourgeois regime in Pakistan over the equally
bourgeois one in India, because India, although desperately poor, was big
enough to be able to maintain a certain independence from the imperialists,
while Pakistan was not.
But in the most recent period, the U.S. has been tilting toward India.
The Indian economy has been growing, while the Indian bourgeoisie has been
dismantling the forms of relative economic independence that it long maintained.
Nonetheless, the United States is unlikely to abandon Pakistan. If India
were able to absorb Pakistan or make it into a satellite, it would be far
too powerful a state for Washington, and the U.S. would lose a key lever
of its policy in the region. The U.S. also needs the Pakistani ruling class
as an ally for its maneuvers with conservatives in the Muslim countries.
The support of the military government in Pakistan was essential for
the success of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and it remains essential to
Washington's operation there. But the U.S. has needed India's support as
well, including as a pressure on Pakistan.
Now, the U.S. is ahoist by its own petard. The Indian rulers can and
do argue that the U.S. is applying a double standard in its "war on
terrorism," launching a full scale war in the name of defending itself
against Islamist terrorism, while turning a blind eye to Pakistan-sponsored
Islamist terrorism against India.
On the other hand, Indian politics is no longer dominated by the Congress
Party, which officially eschewed religious partisanship, but by the Hindu
chauvinists implicated in pogroms against Muslims.
A major war between India and Pakistan would risk becoming a pretext
for attacks on the Indian Muslims on a vast scale. In fact, although Muslims
are a minority in India, they are more numerous than the Muslims living
in Pakistan.
Washington has clearly been bringing pressure to bear to prevent an
India-Pakistan war, which would be a disaster for its policy in the region
as well as for humanity in general. But it is far from certain that it can
prevent an explosion of the contradictions that it and its older brother,
British imperialism (which fostered Muslim separatism as a weapon against
the Indian liberation movement), have created.
The threat of war between India and Pakistan-already a disaster for the
population living on the border-is another demonstration that the imperialists
cannot solve the problems they have created. The only ones who can solve
them are the peoples of the region themselves.
In this regard, the most hopeful signs are reports of a growing antiwar
movement in both India and Pakistan.
This development merits all possible attention and solidarity from all
those who are concerned about peace and the welfare of the overwhelming
majority of the world's people.
Socialist Action /January 2002 |