Author: Asad Ismi
Publication: Bharatiya Pragna
Date: August 2002
The United States' choice of Pakistan
as an ally in its "war on terrorism" provides the spectacle of the two
leading terrorist states on Earth "fighting terrorism." The US has killed
more than eight million people in the Third World since 1945, while Pakistan
slaughtered almost three million Bengalis in the Eastern wing of the country
in 1971. This caused the break-up of the state, with East Pakistan separating
and becoming Bangladesh.
Since 1951, Pakistan's main purpose
has been to act as the US Government's South Asian terrorist arm, serving
to destabilize the former Soviet Union, India and Afghanistan, and crushing
all attempts to achieve democracy in the region. Washington's instrument
has been the Pakistan army, which US officials have called "the greatest
single stabilizing force in the country." Its major "military" campaigns
have been launched against its own unarmed people.
Soon after Pakistan's Independence
in 1947, the US provided $411 million to establish its armed forces. When
the country's first democratic elections scheduled for 1958 threatened
to reduce the army's power, General Mohammed Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief,
cancelled them and took over the government in a coup. This created a military
dictatorship still continuing till this day.
Pakistan became an US-financed garrison
state, spending 80 per cent of its budget on the military, which massacred
thousands of people and ensured that most of those not killed continued
to be mired in poverty and illiteracy.
Ayub was an actual employee of the
US State Department, which paid him an annual salary of US $16,000. There
is little doubt that the US government was "fully aware" that the Pakistan
army was planning a coup. A few years after the 1958 coup, Sardar Bahadur,
Ayub's brother, alleged that the CIA had "been fully involved" in the coup.
Ayub declared Pakistan to be Washington's
"most allied ally," and explained his takeover by claiming that "Democracy
cannot work in a hot climate." Ayub allowed the US to use Pakistani air
bases for the CIAs U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union. The US also controlled
a signals intelligence facility near Peshawar which monitored Soviet military
activity.
Such servility prompted John Foster
Dulles, the US Secretary of State (during the 1950s), to call Pakistan
"a bulwark of freedom in Asia." As Milton Bearden, a former CIA station
chief in Pakistan, recently put it, "[Pakistan is] the only country in
South Asia that always did what we asked."
The Pakistan government's terrorism
has mainly been perpetrated against its own people, with the US-armed and
trained military unleashing genocidal wars on all those who dared oppose
its dictatorship. With US arms, training, military aid, and encouragement,
the Pakistan army butchered half a million to three million Bengalis in
1971 when their popular, elected, left-wing leadership had the temerity
to demand provincial autonomy.
US officials reacted to this slaughter
by thanking General Yahya Khan, the Pakistani military dictator, for his
"delicacy and tact." As one eye witness described it, the army in East
Pakistan was "like a pack of wild dogs," killing" on a scale not seen since
the Third Reich." One thousand intellectuals were murdered in a single
day at Dhaka University alone. "Women were raped or had their breasts torn
out with specially fashioned knives," one journalist (who fled) reported.
"Children did not escape the horror: the lucky ones were killed with their
parents; but many thousands must go through what life remains for them
with eyes gouged out and limbs roughly amputated."
Losing East Pakistan (which constituted
half the country) did not prevent the army from attacking another province
only two years later. In 1973, four Pakistan army divisions assaulted Baluch
tribal communities in the province of Baluchistan, wiping out "mountain
villages and nomad caravans." Like the Bengalis, the Baluchi political
leadership was elected, popular, Left-wing, and also wanted autonomy.
Mirage fighter-bombers and US Cobra
helicopter gunships pummeled unarmed Baluch civilians for five years. Of
the 5,000 Baluch men, women and children captured by the army in 1977,
95 per cent were "brutally tortured." As one account puts it: "Apart from
the standard practice of severe beatings, limbs are broken or cut off;
eyes gouged out; electric shocks applied especially to the genitals; beards
and hair tom out; fingernails ripped; water and food withheld."
The Pakistan army has provided Washington
with an instrument for crushing or hindering progressive social movements,
not just inside Pakistan, but also in South Asia. India's nonalignment
and the good relations of both India and Afghanistan with the, Soviet Union
were anathema to Washington, which deployed Pakistan against both countries.
When a left-wing government came
to power in Afghanistan in 1978, the US decided to overthrow it, using
Pakistan as a conduit. The New York Times described, the main objectives
of this government as being the implementation of land reform and the expansion
of education for women. Afghan Islamic fundamentalist Groups (known as
Mujahideen) which was in exile in Pakistan were covertly armed by the CIA
and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and sent to Afghanistan.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security
Adviser in the Carter administration, knew that this policy would, as he
put it, "induce a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan." Brzezinski stated
in a recent interview: "That secret operation was an excellent idea. It
had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap." Once the
Soviets invaded in December 1979, the US poured $6 billion in military
aid to the Mujahideen through Pakistan. The ensuing war destroyed Afghanistan,
ending all hopes of progressive reforms. With the withdrawal of the Soviets
in 1989, Afghanistan became a centre for the US and Pakistani-backed international
terrorism. Islamist fighters trained there poured into Central Asia and
India, -aiming to create a pan-Islamic state stretching from Kashmir to
Kazakhstan. The Taliban was a CIA-ISI creation as well, and its relations
with Washington only soured when the two failed to reach an accord on sharing
the oil riches of Central Asia.
According to Prof Michel Chossudovsky
at the University of Ottawa, "Since the Soviet-Afghan war, recruiting Mujahidin
to fight covert wars on Washington's behest has become an integral part
of the US foreign policy. A 1997 document of the US Congress reveals how
the Clinton administration had "helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic
base," leading to the recruitment through the so-called "Militant Islamic
Network" of thousands of Mujahedin from the Muslim world. "The 'Bosnian
pattern' has since been replicated in Kosovo, Southern Serbia and Macedonia."
India has long been the kind of
Third World state that Washington detested. It had close relations with
the Soviet Union, followed an independent foreign policy, opposed Western
imperialist adventures and created a significant public sector industrial
base and a protected domestic economy which included two communist states
(West Bengal and Kerala). The US response has been to "bleed India" through
Pakistan's support for secessionist insurgencies in order to open up the
Indian economy to American penetration.
In the 1980s, Pakistan trained and
armed Sikh militants who fought for a separate homeland in Indian Punjab.
Today, in the disputed state of Indian Kashmir, Pakistan has been "sponsoring
terrorism" for more than a decade. Islamic militants trained and armed
in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been fighting for Kashmir's integration
with Pakistan, leading to about 60,000 deaths.
On October 1, 2001, these groups
exploded a car bomb that killed 38 people (most of them civilians) near
the state legislature building in Srinagar. On December 13, 2001, two Pakistan-based
terrorist groups attacked the Indian Parliament. India moved half a million
troops to its border with Pakistan and the two armies-both possessing nuclear
weapons-still stand on the brink of war.
No doubt heavy-handed Indian policies
have alienated Sikhs and Kashmiris, and India is guilty of massive human
rights violations in Kashmir; but, as The New York Times put it, "Since
1994, the role of native Kashmiris in the insurgency has diminished as
heavily-armed outsiders from Pakistan and Afghanistan have stepped up the
violence."
These insurgencies have sapped India's
ability to build its economic infrastructure. This, according to one observer,
has "slowed the pace of growth and development, and precipitated demands
for rapid privatization and reliance on foreign investment."
The rewards for being a US terrorist
arm in South Asia have been lucrative for the Pakistan military's officer
corps. During the war against the Soviets, Afghanistan supplied 60 per
cent of the US's heroin. Pakistani generals "were deeply involved" in this
drug trade. The most prominent was General Fazle Haq, known as "Pakistan's
Noriega." Haq was appointed governor of the Northwest Frontier Province
(bordering Afghanistan) by General Zia-ul Haq, Pakistan's military dictator
during 1977-1988. As governor, Fazle Haq was in charge of Mujahideen military
operations, he also protected the production of 200 heroin labs near the
border. In 1982, Interpol identified Haq as "a key player in the Afghan
Pakistani opium trade." Haq, who had $3 million in his bank account, was
protected from drug investigations by Zia and the CIA.
In 1993, Raoolf Ali Khan, Pakistan's
representative to the UN Commission on Narcotics, said "there is no branch
of government where drug corruption does not pervade." The CIA reported
to the US Congress in 1994 that heroin had become "the life-blood of the
Pakistani economy and political system."
Drug trafficking is just one part
of the Pakistani military's parasitism. The armed forces own an airline,
sugar mills, chemical plants, a cereal factory, and several hospitals.
Officers and their families are supplied with free servants, education,
and medical care, and the best real estate in large cities is reserved
for them.
The price for their country being
a US terrorist base has been paid by the Pakistani people, who for 55 years
have been massacred, tortured, denied education (the illiteracy rate in
Pakistan is 90 per cent), medical care, housing, adequate nutrition, and
political rights. Pakistan ranks near the bottom of the UN's list of countries
by every measure of human development, including infant mortality, life
expectancy, the poverty rate, and the population growth rate.
With India and Pakistan almost perpetually
on the brink of nuclear war, continued subservience by Pakistan to the
US dictates exposes its oppressed people to total eradication.
(Asad Ismi is a specialist on international
politics. He was formerly a citizen of Pakistan. Taken from The CCPA Monitor,
June 2002 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives http://www.policyaltematives.ca)
