Death squads, disappearances and torture in Pakistan

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Death squads, disappearances and torture in Pakistan
16 September 2009

As the Obama administration prepares a major escalation of the
so-called AfPak war, reports from Pakistan’s Swat Valley, near
Afghanistan’s eastern border, provide a gruesome indication of the
kind of war that the Pentagon and its local allies are waging.

While touted by Obama and his supporters as the “good war,” there is
mounting evidence that the Pentagon and the CIA are engaged in a war
against the population of the region involving death squads,
disappearances and torture.

The Pakistani army sent 20,000 troops into Swat, part of the country’s
North West Frontier Province (NWFP), last April to wage war against
ethnic Pashtun Islamist movements (routinely described as the
Pakistani Taliban) that have supported fellow Pashtuns across the
border who are resisting the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan.

This offensive, which was carried out on the direct and highly public
insistence of US envoy Richard Holbrooke and senior American military
officers during repeated trips to Islamabad, unleashed a humanitarian
catastrophe. In what amounted to a massive exercise in collective
punishment, many civilians were killed or wounded and some 2.5 million
people were driven from their homes.

Now, the Pakistani military continues to occupy the area, carrying out
a reign of terror in which individuals identified as opponents of the
government and the US occupation across the border are being picked up
and tortured to death.

According to a report published September 15 in the New York Times,
with the military occupation of the Swat Valley “a new campaign of
fear has taken hold, with scores, perhaps hundreds, of bodies dumped
on the streets in what human rights advocates and local residents say
is the work of the military.”

While the Pakistani military has denied responsibility for this wave
of killings—blaming them on civilians seeking revenge against the
Islamists—the Times quotes local residents, politicians and human
rights workers as blaming the army. They point, the article states, to
“the scale of the retaliation, the similarities in the way that many
of the victims have been tortured and the systematic nature of the
deaths and disappearances in areas that the military firmly controls.”

In addition to bearing marks of brutal torture, many of the bodies are
discovered with their hands tied behind their backs and with a bullet
in the back of the neck. In some cases corpses have been beheaded.

On September 1, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn quoted government
officials as saying that 251 bodies had been found dumped along the
roadside in the Swat Valley since July. On August 27, the newspaper
reported that 51 bodies had been found in the area in the space of
just 24 hours.

Dawn has also reported the discovery of a number of mass graves
containing victims of the military and referred to local residents who
had “witnessed the crude and inhuman lumping together of the living
and the dead.”

The Times cites the case of Akhtar Ali, 28, arrested by the military
at his electrical repair shop on September 1. While military officials
repeatedly told his family that he would be released, four days later
his corpse was dumped on their doorstep, bearing cigarette burns and
with nails hammered into his flesh. “There was no place on his body
not tortured,” his family said in a petition seeking justice.

American officials have praised the Pakistani military for its
campaign in the Swat Valley, with US Ambassador Anne Patterson
visiting Mingora, Swat’s largest town, last week to congratulate the army.

Now US officials are pressing the Pakistani government to replicate
this bloody campaign in South Waziristan. A similar offensive is
already underway in the Khyber Agency, site of the Khyber Pass, a key
route for supplies to the US occupation force in Afghanistan. UN
officials report that 100,000 people have been displaced by the attack.

Washington stands behind the atrocities being carried out against the
Pakistani people. It is funding the Pakistani military operations,
with some $2.5 billion in overt military aid this fiscal year.
Meanwhile, CIA drone attacks continue, having claimed nearly 600
Pakistani victims over the past year, the majority of them civilians.

There is every reason to suspect that the wave of disappearances,
torture and death squad assassinations in Pakistan is also “made in
the USA.”

Before becoming the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley
McChrystal headed the military’s Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC), the secret special operations unit that investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh described as an “executive assassination wing.”

US special forces “trainers” are operating on Pakistani soil,
instructing Pakistani forces in the kind of tactics favored by
JSOC—tactics that yield the bound and battered bodies dumped in the
streets of Swat.

These tactics fit a long pattern of US counterinsurgency warfare, from
Operation Phoenix in Vietnam to the US-backed death squads that
terrorized the population of El Salvador in the 1980s.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen warned again Tuesday
in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the
military will almost certainly seek an increase in troop levels over
the 70,000 American soldiers and Marines that are to be deployed in
Afghanistan by the end of this year.

Citing diplomatic sources, Dawn reported that Gen. McChrystal is
calling for a shift in the war’s focus to the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border area.

Having lost control of most of Afghanistan after nearly eight years of
US occupation, the Pentagon is preparing to launch a new wave of
bloodletting and terror against the population on both sides of the
border in the hope of breaking popular resistance.

The administration of Barack Obama, elected on a wave of antiwar
sentiment, is already implicated in war crimes that rival those
carried out by his predecessor. Support for the war within the US has
declined to levels approaching those reached over Iraq, with the
latest CNN poll showing 58 percent of Americans opposing the US
occupation of Afghanistan and only 39 percent supporting it.

Driven by the interests of the US ruling elite, the escalation of this
dirty war, together with the escalating assault on jobs and living
standards at home, is creating the conditions for the emergence of a
mass political movement of working people against the Obama
administration and the profit system which is the driving force of
imperialist war.

Bill Van Auken

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/pers-s16.shtml

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