Admiral Mullen blames Pakistan for U.S. debacle in Afghanistan

Pakistani merchants can hardly keep up with the demand for U.S. flags, wrote The Telegraph of London on Sept. 29.

However, the U.S. State Department won’t be cheering about this. It seems the purpose for which people want the flags is “to be stamped, trampled or burned.”

Yes, U.S. imperialism has lost any grip it might once have had on the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people. They are particularly angry right now because the last thing that Adm. Mike Mullen did before retiring from his job as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was to testify before Congress, accusing Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, of involvement in the Sept. 13 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The anger this created was not because the Pakistani people are so fond of the ISI. It is because Mullen’s testimony set up Pakistan for more drone attacks and other illegal acts of war carried out by the U.S. on Pakistani soil.

As Comrade Shahid of the Pakistan USA Freedom Forum told Workers World, Mullen was pushing for the “Cambodiazation” of the war. This refers to when the U.S. invaded Cambodia in 1970 — a desperate attempt to rescue imperialism’s effort to defeat the liberation forces in neighboring Vietnam by spreading the war.

Mullen’s testimony was another example of the Pentagon pushing its pro-war agenda — and demanding from Congress the money for it — beyond where the civilian government has decided to go. President Barack Obama had to contradict Mullen publicly only a few days later, on Sept. 30, and admit that the U.S. has no clear intelligence to back up Mullen’s charge.

At the same time, Obama showed that he would not go far to resist the warhawks. He authorized the expansion of drone attacks in Pakistan’s border area near Afghanistan. He had to publicly assure the Pakistanis, however, that there would be no “boots on the ground” — no U.S. invasion, which many had feared after Mullen’s testimony.

The reaction inside Pakistan to Mullen’s threat had been swift and overwhelming. After countless demonstrations where U.S. flags were trampled and burned, the leaders of all political parties held a conference to denounce Mullen and deny his charges.

It speaks to the declining influence of U.S. imperialism all over the world that even with tens of thousands of troops and an endless stream of high-tech weaponry, it has been unable to defeat the resistance to foreign occupation in Afghanistan — one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world!

The military brass and their corporate sponsors in the last decade have managed to squeeze trillions of dollars out of the U.S. Treasury in the name of patriotism and fighting terrorism. But the wars have done nothing to revive capitalism, which has been in the tank for at least three years. Now the resulting budget crisis is coming back to haunt the politicians, who are told they must cut every social service, laying off hundreds of thousands of postal workers and teachers and nurses, so the Pentagon and the bankers can be paid.

As resistance to all this grows inside the United States itself, it is becoming harder and harder for the imperialists to carry out their agenda of recolonizing the world. The harder they push in places like Pakistan, the more they undercut their own puppets and collaborators and spur on the mass struggle.