Daily Times

The Iranian regime has been supporting clerics and sectarian terrorist outfits not only in Pakistan but also in many other countries in the region. Shia clerics and religious parties are heavily funded across the Middle East and other countries of the region by the Iranian state. To keep them subservient these Shia outfits are fed on sectarian hatred. The fall of Mubarak in Egypt and the temporary retreat of the Arab revolutionary upheaval provided them with the long awaited opportunity to interfere in the region and impose their writ. Along with the internal crisis of the Iranian state and its decaying economy, they needed more external enemies to crush the prospects of open class struggle inside Iran. In these circumstances, Islamic State (IS) was a gift for the Iranian mullah regime, against which they could build rhetoric to rally their sectarian support. Similarly, Saudi aggression in Yemen will provide them with more content for instigating sectarian frenzy. In essence, the Saudi and Iranian proxy war is benefiting both regimes in the short term. However, contrary to their will and aims, the consequences of these wars and aggressions will come back to haunt them. Though the Arab Revolution has receded without achieving its ultimate goals, the reactionary elements have not been able to find fertile ground to spread their ideas on a mass scale. The speed of events can lead to sharp swings in public opinion and mass movements can erupt on revolutionary lines but counterrevolutionary reaction can also not be ruled out.
The intervention of Pakistan’s military in the Middle East is not a new phenomenon. They have been used as mercenaries by the reactionary and despotic regimes of the region for decades. One of the most gruesome episodes was the massacre of the Palestinians in Jordan in 1970 to protect the monarchy there. From 1967 to 1970, Brigadier Muhammad Ziaul Haq (later chief of army staff and president of Pakistan) was stationed in Jordan in official military capacity to protect the Hashemite Kingdom. On September 15, 1970, King Hussein declared martial law in Jordan to crush the Palestinians. The next day, Jordanian tanks of the 60th Armoured Brigade attacked the headquarters of Palestinian organisations in Amman; the army also attacked camps in Irbid, Salt, Sweileh, Baqaa, Wehdat and Zarqa. Ziaul Haq was given command of the second division. King Hussein took this extraordinary step because he was terrified that the Jordanian generals would refuse to massacre fellow Palestinians and could turn their guns against him. The US-backed Jordanian army shelled the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) headquarters in Amman and battled with Palestinian guerrillas in the narrow streets of the capital. Yasser Arafat later claimed that the Jordanian and Pakistani troops killed between 10,000 and 25,000 Palestinians.
The intensity of bloodletting by Ziaul Haq and King Hussein was such that one of the reactionary fundamentalist leaders of Israel, Moshe Dayan, cynically remarked: “King Hussein, with help from Ziaul Haq of the Pakistani army, sent in his Bedouin army on September 27 to clear out the Palestinian bases in Jordan. Hussein killed more Palestinians in 11 days than Israel could kill in 20 years.”
However, any direct intervention of the Pakistani troops in this Saudi aggression against Yemen will be much more dangerous and will boomerang on the ruling classes and the state, both from the regional conflict with Iran and the mass wrath against interventions as mercenaries in reactionary wars. The indecisiveness of the ruling elite exposes their fear and cowardice. Currently, the Pakistani state is quite different to what it was in the 1970s or 1980s. Now it is at war with itself. A cruel operation is being carried out in Balochistan on a vast scale in which hundreds of Baloch militants have been killed and their mutilated bodies thrown in the streets every day. Helicopter gunships are used to annihilate whole villages and towns in which women and children are mercilessly killed. A so-called operation against the Taliban is also being carried out in the tribal regions along the Afghan border. In this ‘operation’ many ordinary Pashtuns are killed on the pretext of killing the Taliban, while real terrorists are protected by sections of the state. In Karachi, the army is also involved in an internecine conflict between the neo-fascist MQM, Taliban terrorists and other reactionary forces.
Suicide bombs, lynchings by mobs and other terrorist activities have become a normality in which warring factions of the Pakistani state play a key role. It always relies heavily upon sectarian hatred to continue its oppression of the working masses. In this crisis-ridden state, the army is the largest real estate developer in Pakistan while it is also the biggest investor and entrepreneur in industry and services. Billions of dollars worth in the drugs trade from Afghanistan’s opium fields are smuggled through ports on the Arabian Sea coast to parts of Europe and elsewhere. All this leads to more bloodletting between warring factions of the proxies involved. If the Pakistani army is thrown into the Yemeni conflict it will have a huge impact on this institution itself. This army is not trained on sectarian lines yet it will be sent to fight and bomb people of one sect on the orders of rulers from another sect. This will have a devastating impact on the army ranks, which will lead to bitter conclusions for the ruling classes and the stability of the state will be in jeopardy.
However, the Pakistani working class has a long history of struggle and revolutions against attacks by the ruling class. Pakistani workers are working with Yemeni workers in very harsh conditions in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Whenever the rulers have tried to divide them and use them as mercenaries, there have always been incidents of class solidarity among the workers. In the past, Baloch student leaders defied attempts by the Pakistani state to send the Baloch to Oman and Bahrain as mercenaries. Those student leaders had to pay for this defiance with their lives. Once again the orgy of blood and hatred by the ruling classes of the Middle East and Pakistan will find a fitting response from the working class and revolutionary youth of this region. Class solidarity is the only way out of this mayhem.
From the shores of the Mediterranean to the Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East is descending into bloody chaos and barbarism. This is the only outcome under capitalism. The Arab revolutionary upheaval of 2011 proved that once the masses move all the reactionaries can be swept aside. Without the overthrow of these reactionary regimes — from the Israeli Zionists to the despotic Saudi monarchy to the mullahcracy in Iran and the rotten Pakistani ruling elite — no solution or progress is possible. Without a socialist revolution this task cannot be completed. A revolutionary transformation in any one country will spread this revolutionary wave across the whole region and far beyond, sooner rather than later.

(Concluded)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com