Pakistan's poor caught in the middle

The political and moral crisis wracking Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer concentrates all the ills of our 21st century world - but also demonstrates the need for a revolutionary alternative.

Divisions have reached civil war proportions over Taseer’s violent death in Islamabad’s fashionable Kohsar Market. Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) activists and opponents of religious fanaticism plus campaigners for democratic and economic rights are mourning Taseer as a courageous and cultured hero. He was close to the persecuted Bhutto family and suffered imprisonment when Pakistan was under martial law.

On the other side, Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer’s assassin, has a Facebook page dedicated to him and supporters are rallying for his release, showering him with rose petals as he gets taken to and from court. Qadri shot the man he was supposed to protect over 27 times because Taseer wanted to amend Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

But the religious powder keg could blind us to the deeper contradictions that are dividing the country. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is considered a frontline ally of America, sharing as it does, a long border with eastern Afghanistan, the stronghold of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

But the billions in military and civilian aid poured in by the Obama administration have failed to achieve either economic improvement or military success. The frustrations of millions of poverty-stricken people in the country are summed by comments given to a reporter by Arif Fasiullah, 35, from the central city of Multan: "There is no electricity, no gas, no jobs, and they are fighting one another. They do not pass any legislation. They just do dirty politics."

Pakistan, with a population of more than 180 million, faces chronic power failures that can last up to 16 hours per day in some areas during the scorching summer, and up to a third of its people lack access to clean drinking water. Average income per capita is less than $3,000 a year, and most adults have less than five years of schooling.

The International Monetary Fund, which has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars in loans to keep its economy afloat, has demanded the country implement significant changes, including deep cuts to its deficit and a revised general sales tax. These have proved highly unpopular.

Even as you read this, US war planes are continuing drone attacks on north-west Pakistan, which have killed four people in the last 24 hours, with a hundred raids carried out in 2010. Despite all the dollars and US efforts to keep Pakistan onside in the so-called war against terror, the relationship between the US spy agency, the CIA and Pakistan’s equally sinister Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the operation against south and north Waziristan has reached an all-time low.

It is the economic crisis of global capital which sparked the IMF’s demand that the government raise taxes. That led to an increase in petrol prices (since withdrawn) plus the sacking of a minister that caused the collapse of the parliamentary coalition just before the crisis over Taseer’s murder.

No wonder that reactionary religious leaders seek to cash in on cruel suffering of the majority. Those seen as favouring “western democracy” and supporting “the war against terror” can be rightly be denounced as maintaining the rule of a rich and corrupt elite while others suffer.

Neither the secular bourgeois “westernisers”, nor the military nor the Muslim establishment can take Pakistan an inch forward or resolve the extreme poverty that affects the majority. The development of a secular leadership campaigning for People’s Assemblies to challenge for political power is the issue of the day.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Extrajudicial murder by CIA drones

The slap on the wrist delivered to Israel yesterday by foreign secretary David Miliband over the use of fake British passport in the murder of a leading member of Hamas in Dubai should not obscure the fact that “targeted assassination” is a policy that Washington carries out in Afghanistan and Pakistan with London’s blessing.

Miliband had nothing to say about the actual killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by agents of the Israeli secret service Mossad, not even in a roundabout way that covered all eventualities. That’s because in private, New Labour and the US government support so-called “targeted assassinations” themselves – a policy that clearly violates international laws and could be considered a war crime.

Most days, for example, pilotless drones unleash a deadly attack on targets in Pakistan which, it should be remembered, is a sovereign state that has not given permission for its airspace to be violated by the United States in this way. This morning the BBC reported that missiles fired by a suspected US drone killed at least five people in north-west Pakistan's tribal region.

The missiles hit an area near Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan district, bordering Afghanistan, officials said. The identity of those killed is not yet known. Hundreds of people, including a number of militants, have been killed in scores of drone strikes since August 2008.

For every Taliban fighter or Al-Qaeda leader killed, many more civilians perish as the missiles come out of a clear blue sky to hit their village. Earlier this year, Pakistan’s leading newspaper Dawn reported:

“Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians. According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009. For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.”

The drone attacks were sanctioned by George W. Bush in 2008 and have actually been stepped up by his successor. More attacks have occurred in the first year of the Obama presidency than all years of his predecessor.

The programme is operated by the CIA spy agency and the targets selected by agents in front of computer screens at the agency’s HQ in Langley, Virginia, half a world away. No doubt it’s like a video game for the operatives while the CIA officially denies the very existence of drone killings because it’s a “covert” operation. New York University law professor Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions since 2004, says his requests for US legal justification for what are effectively extrajudicial executions are always denied.

In August last year, Khaista Khan, saw 12 charred bodies after US missiles struck a small hamlet in North Waziristan. He said: “Americans are cowards. They are afraid of fighting man-to-man in a battlefield and that is why they hit from the sky and run away. Many people who did not support the Taliban previously support them now because the Americans are killing innocent people.”

Apparently, 44 countries have unmanned aircraft for surveillance. There are only two countries that use the drones for killing people. One is the United States. The other is, naturally enough, Israel.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor