Pakistan’s dilemma

The NATO imperialists, chief among them the U.S., showed their desperation when they attacked Pakistani soldiers on Nov. 26, killing more than two dozen. Helicopters and fighter jets of the Western military alliance, representing countries that once held most of the world as their outright colonies, flew over the border from bases in Afghanistan to carry out this unabashed act of war.

After some half-hearted apologies from Washington, the Pentagon brass announced they would investigate the incident. That reassured no one. Anti-U.S. demonstrations are continuing in Pakistan.

The U.S. has leaned heavily on Pakistan’s civilian and military authorities for a long time. It wants them to police the region and eradicate any forces hostile to U.S.-corporate domination of that part of the world. Under both military dictators like Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and civilian presidents like Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani military received huge amounts of money from the U.S. In return, it has usually done Washington’s bidding.

General Zia was a major U.S. ally in the CIA war that brought down a progressive secular government in Afghanistan. At that time, in the 1980s, the U.S. spent billions to recruit, equip and train a covert army in Afghanistan. This army enlisted some of the same Islamic forces, like the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which are now fighting against the Pentagon.

President Benazir Bhutto, again under U.S. pressure, sent Pakistani troops to guard sites in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War. Thus the Pentagon expects to get Pakistan to once again do its dirty work in exchange for more money and weapons to keep the military on top there.

Instead, the Pentagon is finding it more and more difficult to get what they want, even after sending drones and Special Forces into Pakistan to rain missiles and bombs on villages near the Afghan border and now actually bombing a group of Pakistani soldiers.

This attack is a clear violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, but it is also a sign of imperialism’s weakening hold on the world. The U.S. can wage wars — it is engaged in many right now, from Afghanistan to Libya to Somalia — and do terrible damage, but it cannot subdue the people by military means alone. If the U.S. can’t win the war in Afghanistan, one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world, how can it hope to hold onto its far-flung empire?

Not by military might alone could European and U.S. capitalists become de facto rulers over billions of people during the time of the dynamic growth of capitalism and its revolutionary development of the means of production. It was the cheap commodities of the industrial era, as Karl Marx pointed out, that made it possible for the armies and navies of the West — and for a while Japan — to batter down the Chinese walls and turn great countries into their vassals.

That was then. Today the financial crises originating in Europe and Wall Street are dragging the economies of the whole world down — and people everywhere know it. Even bourgeois governments like that in Pakistan, with a long history of accepting the role of imperialism’s regional junior “partner,” must put up some resistance to the Pentagon if it is to have any credibility at home. And with each new military atrocity, the U.S. ruling class only deepens the dilemma of those it needs to be its puppets.