Musharraf resigns but Pakistan’s crisis remains

Pakistanis poured into the streets of their country’s major cities and towns Aug. 18 to celebrate as Gen. Pervez Musharraf announced he would resign from the presidency to avoid impeachment. He first took power nine years ago in a military coup.

The former army chief, hated by the people but an ally of George W. Bush, said he was resigning because “the Pakistani nation will be the loser” if there is an impeachment proceeding. “After taking advice from my supporters and friends, I have decided to resign in the best interests of the nation.”

It was an admission that Washington and many in Pakistan’s ruling class and military pushed for the general’s resignation, hoping it would lower tensions in Pakistan. His departure, however, especially if he evades punishment for his many crimes, will not placate the democracy movement in Pakistan. Nor will it resolve the conflict of Pakistan’s capitalist ruling class with neighboring India, both of them nuclear-armed powers, nor with anti-government forces on its Afghan border.

Nor does it resolve Pakistan’s skyrocketing inflation. “The poor are the worst hit,” writes analyst Tariq Ali in the Aug. 17 Independent, “but middle-class families are also affected and, according to a June 2008 survey, 86 percent of Pakistanis find it increasingly difficult to afford flour on a daily basis, for which they blame their government.”

Rather than an end, the general’s resignation is just another step in the unfolding of the anti-imperialist and class struggle in this country of 170 million people, representing many nationalities and language and ethnic groups. These conflicts developed at an accelerated rate after Washington enlisted Musharraf and the Pakistani state in the so-called war on terror after 9/11. The war has proven to be nothing more than an imperialist attempt to dominate the countries of Central and South Asia in order to open up their resources to exploitation by U.S. transnationals.

Musharraf’s support dropped like a stone. He was hated by the population and his political rivals and abandoned by many of his former supporters in the military. The Pakistani Parliament was about to bring impeachment charges against the general for crimes against Pakistan’s Constitution.

Musharraf aroused popular indignation when he ordered the storming of a mosque last year, which resulted in the killing of over 100 people, and on Nov. 3, when he declared martial law and deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, in violation of the constitution. This arbitrary decision aroused the anger of lawyers throughout the country and led to mass demonstrations. There was also massive suspicion that the Musharraf regime orchestrated the assassination of his political rival, Benazir Bhutto.

The general’s subservience to Washington created the contradictions that led to his downfall. The new government, if it continues the alignment with the U.S., will be in the same boat.

To call Musharraf a U.S. “ally” oversimplifies the relationship. Musharraf himself once said on the CBS News 60 Minutes program (Sept. 24, 2006) that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had called Pakistan’s intelligence director shortly after 9/11 and threatened military action if Pakistan did not support the U.S. According to Musharraf, Armitage warned: “Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.”

To follow Washington’s lead, Musharraf had to break with the policy of Pakistan’s secret police agency, the ISI, toward the Taliban in Afghanistan. The ISI had helped bring the Taliban to power—at a time when Washington also saw the Taliban as allies against secular leftists in Afghanistan. Since then, Washington has created a new pro-U.S. government there and tried to eliminate all opposition to it.

Washington has put the same pressure on the new Pakistani government, still dominated by ruling-class politicians dependent on their relationship to imperialism. Striking from bases in Afghanistan, U.S. planes have bombed Pakistan’s border regions, killing many civilians and even striking Pakistani troops and officers in June.

Undoubtedly responding to this U.S. pressure, the Pakistan army bombed and shelled in this region in the first half of August. Pakistan’s Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik vowed to “wipe out” Islamic militants in a volatile tribal region “where the government says more than 460 insurgents and 22 troops have died in 10 days of fighting.” (AP, Aug. 16)

The general may depart but the crisis and bloodshed remain.

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