Another Sharif is doing the
rounds in Washington, less than a month after the Prime Minister (PM), Nawaz Sharif, met with US President Barack Obama at the Oval Office to discuss many of the same issues said to be on his army chief’s agenda, including Afghan peace talks and Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. General Raheel Sharif has been accorded full protocol reinforcing the perception that the Americans are far more anxious and entangled with the military as opposed to the civilians, thus providing fuel to hawks in the media to undermine and denigrate Nawaz Sharif’s visit by implying that it was the military calling the shots and directing the country’s security and foreign policies.
Nawaz Sharif rolled his federal minister, Abdul Qadir Baluch, a retired army general, to his defence, who proclaimed, “The military is a subservient institution of the prevailing civilian government.” Talat Masood, a retired lieutenant general, noted the unusual circumstances surrounding the trip and told AFP: “The Americans know where the power is… it is not that the Americans have invited him (military chief) but he has invited himself… Normally this does not happen. It signals the gravity of the problems that both countries seem to be facing in the region and especially because of the Afghan situation.”
The temporary capture of Kunduz by the Taliban with the retreat of the US and the NATO forces has led to the weakening of Ashraf Ghani’s presidency and strengthening of the Taliban’s insurgency. Stability in Afghanistan has spiralled after a Taliban surge in recent months, and explains why Obama announced in October that Washington would keep thousands of soldiers in the country post-2016. However, 14 years after the imperialist invasion, the failure of US strategists is staring them in their faces. John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, in an address at Georgetown University on September 12, warned: “Afghanistan remains under assault by insurgents and is gripped with corruption. Without a heavy dose of honesty and fresh thinking by Afghans and their western supporters will almost certainly mean the relapse of Afghanistan into civil war and the emergence of groups even more extreme than the Taliban, as has happened in Iraq and Syria.”
Ahmed Rashid wrote in The New York Times: “Moving from the lengthy US military presence to full Afghan sovereignty was premised on the completion of four distinct transitions. But none has been successfully carried out, despite more than $ 640 billion in direct US spending in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2013.” The Washington Post reported recently: “The Afghan government is broke and needs an emergency $ 537 million bailout; it was barely able to pay more than half a million government employees this month. There has been little large-scale investment in agriculture or basic industry; instead, the bulk of the economy has focused on servicing foreign troops and on their spending. And now the troops are about to withdraw.”
However, in the last 14 years, US imperialists have mainly blamed Pakistan, their ally in this ‘war on terror’, for their failures in the Afghanistan misadventure. It was US imperialism that initiated this counter revolutionary insurgency against the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan in 1978. The vicious military dictator General Ziaul Haq, an arch Islamic fundamentalist, was the darling of the Reagan administration. This wily and brutal dictator not only used Islamic terrorism to devastate Afghanistan but he also crushed workers and youth movements, and brutalised social and cultural life in Pakistan. The Saudis and other despotic monarchies in the Gulf poured in millions to spread Wahhabi terrorist jihad far and wide. The massive black economy fabricated to finance this jihad became a source of conflict between various Islamist terrorist outfits, regional states and institutions of the Pakistani establishment. The Pakistan army used this conflict to entrench its own policy of ‘strategic depth’ by patronising and using these terror groups for its own militaristic and financial interests.
Washington sees Islamabad having the influence to bring sections of terrorist outfits to the negotiating table. The new Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, is believed to have close ties to Pakistan. The Haqqani group, an integral component of the Taliban network, has been described by US officials in the past as a “veritable arm” of the Pakistani intelligence agencies. A recent US State Department report said that while operations carried out by Pakistan’s military had disrupted the actions of many terrorist outfits in the country, groups like the Haqqani network were spared by the offensive. Strategists in Washington believe Pakistan has not done enough to bring its influence to bear and to persuade the group to renounce violence. During PM Nawaz’s trip in October Obama stressed that Pakistan needed to take action against these groups. The pressure has increased since the cancellation of an initial round of peace talks was broken off this summer when the Afghan intelligence suddenly announced the death of long-time Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
Nawaz Sharif agreed last month to help Afghanistan re-start the talks but Washington was sceptical of their success. Not only has there been lingering discord between the military and civilian ruling elites in Pakistan but the Taliban are also divided and fighting a ferocious internecine war on succession and control of the drug trade and black money. A splinter Taliban group is being courted by Islamic State (IS) forces in Afghanistan. Pakistani officials, during General Raheel Sharif’s visit, point out that it is not possible to kill the Afghan Taliban leaders and at the same time persuade them to talk. Pakistan’s main bourgeois’ paper, laid bare the failure of a negotiated settlement on the eve of General Raheel Sharif’s visit: “Alongside red carpet treatment, General Sharif must also be prepared for some tough talking in Washington. It is certainly not going to be a pleasant situation for the army chief. After a brief period of bonhomie that promised to chart a new era of cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is back to the old hostile ways. Relations between the two countries hit a new low after Afghan security officials blamed Pakistan for actively backing the Taliban offensive in Kunduz.”
If war and aggression by the mightiest military power in history has failed to pacify war torn, ‘primitive’ Afghanistan, the prospects of a negotiated settlement are even bleaker. Such are the complexities of the Afghan-Pakistan imbroglio that there is no solution within the existing system of exploitation. However, Afghanistan and Pakistan are not only intertwined in war but historically, economically and culturally they have a common legacy and reality. British imperialists pierced the Durand Line through the hearts of Pashtuns in 1893 to divide and rule. The only way forward out of this bloodshed, mayhem, misery and deprivation is a revolutionary upsurge of the oppressed Pashtuns and other people in the region in a class unity struggle. There cannot be two separate revolutions in Afghanistan and Pakistan now.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]