US threatens wider war in Pakistan

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US threatens wider war in Pakistan
6 October 2010

The week-old standoff between Washington and Islamabad over US military attacks
inside Pakistan and the blocking of a vital NATO supply line in retaliation
underscores the growing threat that the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan is
spiralling out of control.

A dramatic escalation of US attacks on Pakistan set the stage for the sharp
deterioration in relations over the past week. September saw 22 missile strikes
by CIA drones against Pakistani targets, a record number since the attacks began.

The Pakistani government and intelligence services have tolerated and
collaborated in the drone attacks, but the US military carried out a qualitative
escalation of the assault on Pakistan last week, staging a series of
cross-border raids by US helicopter gunships based inside Afghanistan.

While the first of these raids claimed the lives of scores of Pakistanis
described by Washington as “militants”—and by residents of the area as local
tribesmen—the last killed three members of the Pakistani military’s Frontier
Corps and blew to pieces a border post.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, defended this
attack as an act of “self defense.” It was nothing of the sort. The US military
sent its attack helicopters across the border hunting for targets. If there was
any act of self defense, it was by the Frontier Corpsmen, who apparently fired
shots to warn the helicopter that it had crossed the border in violation of
Pakistan’s sovereignty.

In retaliation, the Pakistani government ordered the closure of a vital supply
route for fuel and equipment bound for the US-led occupation forces inside
Afghanistan. Now in its seventh day, the closure of the border crossing at
Torkham has left hundreds of fuel tankers and container trucks stranded on the
road from the Pakistani port of Karachi to the Khyber Pass.

The Tehrik-i-Taliban, an alliance of tribal-based militias hostile to the US
occupation of Afghanistan and the Pakistani regime’s complicity with Washington,
claimed responsibility for a string of attacks on the stalled NATO convoys. On
Monday, attackers burned 20 trucks with Molotov cocktails near Islamabad,
killing six people, while another two trucks were ambushed in Baluchistan, where
a second border crossing has remained open. This follows the burning of 24
trucks and fuel tankers Friday in the south of Pakistan.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Office, Abdul Basit, said that the border
crossing would be reopened only after “public anger eases” in relation to the US
attacks. He attributed the attacks on the NATO convoys to “the reaction of the
Pakistani masses.” The statement made clear that Pakistani government and
military have lent their tacit support to the attacks as means of retaliation.

The US military incursions and stepped up CIA strikes against Pakistan have
apparently been carried out as a means of pressuring the Pakistani government to
launch a long-sought military offensive in North Waziristan to root out the
so-called Haqqani network, an armed opposition group that operates on both sides
of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Islamabad had refused to launch the offensive, citing the devastation wrought by
the massive flooding of the country and its deployment of tens of thousands of
soldiers in relief operations. At the same time, the Pakistani military and its
intelligence service, the ISI, have deep ties with the Haqqani network and see
it as an asset in defending Pakistani interests inside Afghanistan. Last June,
it was reported that top Pakistani officials were engaged in an attempt to
mediate a power-sharing arrangement between the network and the US-backed
government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

It is likely that the recent revelations in the Bob Woodward book Obama’s Wars
have played a role in the ratcheting up of tensions between Washington and
Islamabad.

The book quotes Obama as declaring in an Oval Office meeting last November, “We
need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan.” The objective of
the US military intervention in Afghanistan, he added, was to ensure that “the
cancer doesn’t spread there.”

It also recounts US threats made last May to carry out a massive bombing
campaign against targets inside Pakistan in the event of a successful terrorist
attack on US soil that could be traced back to that country. And it quotes CIA
Director Leon Panetta as insisting that the drone attacks were not an adequate
means of attacking anti-US forces inside Pakistan.

“We can't do this without some boots on the ground,” Panetta is quoted as
saying. “They could be Pakistani boots or they can be our boots, but we got to
have some boots on the ground.” The implication is clear. If the Pakistani
military fails to do Washington’s bidding, the American military will intervene.

While most of this was already known to Pakistan’s military and intelligence, it
has now been widely reported in Pakistan, stoking popular anger against US
arrogance and further discrediting the government in Islamabad as a servile
puppet of Washington.

For decades, the Pakistani military has acted as Washington’s mercenary servant,
called upon repeatedly to defend US interests – including in its collaboration
with the CIA and Islamist elements like Osama bin Laden in the US-orchestrated
war against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It has also
served as an instrument for upholding stability inside Pakistan, including
through the imposition of a series of military dictatorships, from that of Ayub
Khan in the 1950s to the rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was forced out just
two years ago.

Now, however, these two roles are increasingly in conflict, with the war in
Afghanistan and Islamabad’s complicity serving to radically destabilize the
situation in Pakistan itself.

Moreover, the Pakistani bourgeoisie and military see their strategic interests
in the region frustrated at every turn by US imperialism’s military pursuit of
hegemony in oil-rich Central Asia.

This US strategy has led to a “global strategic partnership” with Pakistan’s
regional rival, India, including an Indo-US nuclear treaty that essentially
legitimizes India’s development of nuclear weapons, while exempting it from
restrictions under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

At the same time, a key US aim is countering the regional influence of China,
which has considerable and long-standing interests in Pakistan. While
facilitating India’s nuclear aims, Washington has attempted to block China’s
plans to build two nuclear reactors for Pakistan. Washington has also viewed
with growing hostility China’s attempt to develop naval and commercial port
facilities in Pakistan. The US has likewise worked to stymie a pipeline project
between Pakistan and Iran.

Meanwhile, Washington has sought to exploit the most devastating floods in
Pakistan’s history as a means of further squeezing the Pakistani bourgeoisie,
demanding economic structural “reforms” that would further US capitalist
interests in return for a pittance of aid.

The attempt to further these aims and to untangle the complex geo-political
relations in the region in its favor by unleashing bombs and missiles on
Pakistan underscores the increasing desperation gripping the US war in
Afghanistan and the reckless and incendiary character of Washington’s policy.

Following the strategy dictated by his generals, Obama, just like his
predecessor in the White House, is attempting to exploit US military superiority
to offset American capitalism’s long-term economic decline. This course is
producing regional and global instability that threatens to drag the people of
Pakistan and the entire world into a far bloodier conflagration.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/pers-o06.shtml

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