Peshawar Carnage is just another link in the Brutal Imperialist Operation in Af-Pak Region

- Rajesh Tyagi/ 18.12.2014

Gruesome slaughter, carried out by 7 armed militants of Tehreek-e-Taliban, an extreme right wing organization based in Pakistan, on December 16, inside an army school in Peshawar, has left more than 160 dead, most of them children. Peshawar, is the capital of Khyber Pakhtunwa Province, in North-West of Pakistan. The ghastly attack has invoked public outrage and widespread condemnation across the globe.

Taking exception to the attack, the right-wing capitalist government in Pakistan, led by Pakistan Muslim League (PML) under Nawaz Sharif, was quick to renew its pledge to fight against ‘terrorists’, a fight that it is already engaged in at full pace, since June 2013, at the behest of US and western Imperialism, reinforced by US drones. Even the arch rival of Nawaz Sharif’s government, Imran Khan, a cricketer turned politician and the opposition leader in Pakistan, whose party, Tehrik-e-Pakistan, runs the government in Pakhtunwa Province, has promised to throw its support behind the government in fight against terrorism.

Alongside, bourgeois politicians, the corporate sponsored media is zealously using the public anguish centered around the incident, to cover up a whole series of such brutalities in the region, continuing for decades and rooted in the criminal policy of imperialism led by the United States. The very same media has consciously overlooked the massive assaults by the Pakistan Army in North Western region of Pakistan, resumed and intensified since June last year.

The brutal violence, that haunts the entire Af-Pak region today, relates back to the period of long drawn cold-war between the US and Soviet Union, and for hegemony over Asia, as part of the cold-war. It must be underscored that this tussle in itself was the inevitable result of devastating and bogus policies of Stalin and later of Mao, that had strengthened imperialism during and after the WW-II. The subsequent conflict, between Soviet Union and China, motivated by purely nationalist interests, further reinforced imperialism and provided it an opportunity for political and military built-up in Asia.

The long drawn turmoil in Af-Pak region, has a checkered history, that is bound up more intimately with developments in Afghanistan, than in Pakistan.

Soviets under Stalinist Brezhnev regime, intervened in Afghanistan in December 1979 under a treaty with the Taraki government, to counter the military offensive led by right wing Jamat-e-Islami Party, in Herat uprising. Taraki Government led by Stalinist Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had come to power in April 1978, through a soviet-backed military coup against the regime of Md. Doud, the founder of Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Doud, himself had come to power in a military coup in July 1973, after dethroning his uncle King Md. Zahir Shah and putting an end to monarchy under him. Doud, however, was deposed and executed alongwith his family in 1979, after becoming unpopular with army and Stalinist PDPA, paving way for capture of power by the PDPA under Nur Md. Taraki, dubbed as Saur uprising. Saur uprising sent shockwaves around, including the middle-east triggering similar uprisings in several countries, that included overturn of Shah regime in Iran.

Subsequently, threatened by Islamic fundamentalist Herat uprising, the Taraki regime solicited Soviet intervention. 

Intervention of Soviets in Afghanistan was immediately resisted by the US and its western allies, apart from Saudis, China and Pakistan. 

The Maoist ‘Afghanistan Liberation Organization’, acting in-tandem with Islamic Mujahideens, took up arms to depose PDPA government. Maoist China had been tailing behind US Imperialism, since 1972, as part of its strategy to isolate Soviet Union and inflict maximum damage upon it. While US, Western Powers and Saudis supplied huge amounts of money, it were China and Pakistan, that trained and nurtured the Mujahideens against Soviet occupation. Secret service ISI in Pakistan and its army were chief bastions of direct aid to fundamentalist insurgents. In retaliation, Afghan secret agency KHAD and Soviet secret service KGB carried out innumerable terrorist attacks inside Pakistan. While Soviet forces succeeded in controlling Afghan cities, rest 80% region was controlled by Mujahideens.

The conflict between the PDPA Govt. backed by Soviets on one hand and various groups of Mujahideens on the other, heightened in 1985 to its zenith with Soviet deployment raised to more than one lakh, and hostilities continued till mid 1987 when Gorbachev announced a retreat from Afghanistan.

The failed Soviet policy in Afghanistan, that was guided by nationalist considerations of the Kremlin Bureaucracy, continued from times of Stalin, left the whole Af-Pak region in a whirlpool of acute political crisis. As right-wing forces threatened a comeback, the PDPA government in Kabul, under Nazibullah called for ‘national reconciliation’ but in vain. In 1990, the opportunist Stalinist PDPA portrayed its government with Islamic coloration and introduced new constitution declaring Afghanistan an Islamic republic. The Stalinist PDPA regime under Nazib Ullah continued to weaken till defection of Uzbek militia under Abdul Rashid Dostam, and fall of PDPA government in 1992, forcing Nazib to take shelter in UN embassy in Kabul. The Mujahideens organized under the banner of Taliban, and directly supported by US, Saudis and Pakistan, ultimately staged a coup in 1996, deposing Stalinist Nazibullah regime. Nazib was captured, castrated and dragged behind a truck in streets of Kabul, before being hanged, publicly on a traffic light pole.

The bogus Soviet Policy of Stalinist bureaucracy in Afghanistan, accentuated by purely nationalist considerations, and compounded by venal and equally opportunist policy of Maoist bureaucracy in Peking, oriented to its national interests against Soviet Union, immensely strengthened the positions of imperialists led by the US, and gave them strong foothold in Af-Pak region.

After decline of Soviet Union as super power and end to the cold war era, the US has developed a renewed interest in Asia, suffocating the rival emerging economy of China and cutting Russia to fragments. Needless to say that this crooked policy, is the policy of unlimited wars and infinite destruction across the whole world.

Direct result of this aggressive policy, resorted by the US, was the strengthening of the most conservative and fundamentalist forces on the Afghan territory. Eventually, in its bid to subordinate the Taliban regime to its nefarious designs in Asia or replace it with a more compliant client regime, to use its territory as a base for its operations in Asia, the US administration and the CIA, came in direct conflict with Talibans and in 2001, suffered 9/11 at its hands. Further attempt of US to disarm and dislodge this regime, has only liquidated it into an insurgency movement that has since destabilized the whole region, unleashing a reign of predatory violence.

The Imperialists led by the US, are responsible not only for the savagery imposed upon the workers and toilers by fundamentalists like Talibans, but for their own innumerable brutalities, that far surpass that of the Taliban. Seeking false excuse in Talibani violence, only to advance their own imperialist designs of military expansion in Asia, the imperialists are dragging the entire region into vortex of violence and destruction. Alongside Talibans, the most callous crimes against humanity are being committed by the imperialist armed forces, drones, tanks, machine-guns, automatic rifles, and the brute forces they lend support to.

The fundamentalist organisations like Tehreek-e-Taliban, that has claimed responsibility for the killings of December 16 in Peshawar, find favour with and are bound up with sections of state, police and military establishment in Pakistan and outside. They are funded, trained and armed by elite sections of capitalist rulers, inside and outside the region, who recruit the poor, illiterate, tribesmen from these most backward peripheries of the world, to serve and die in armed militias for their vested interests, deceptively couched in the fiction of ‘religious wars’, like Jehad.

How can one ignore, that while resorting to demagogy against terrorist violence, the imperialists, at the same time, continue to fuel and reinforce these fundamentalist forces in all parts of the world. In Egypt, in Libya, in Syria, in Iran, everywhere they are raising, funding, nurturing, training and arming these forces to their benefit. On the pretext of fighting terrorism, imperialists are imposing a police state inside their own countries and brutal wars outside.

Under conditions of imperialism, the capitalist nation-states are turned into working machines churning out violence and destruction all over the world. ‘Terrorism’ is nothing, but in one form or another, it is proxy war among these national states, ruled by capitalists, in blind pursuit of natural and manual resources, investments and profits. The conflicts, however, would not stand resolved by proxy wars alone. These partisan wars are only a prelude to full-fledged war among these capitalist nation-states, the Third World War. Near prospects of this war, among the nuclear powers, threaten the survival of mankind and call for immediate intervention of the only revolutionary class, for rescue- the international working class. 

Only the united working class in South and West Asia, organized around the program of ‘Permanent Revolution’ can effectively counter and defeat the imperialist agenda, that is solely responsible for the present state of chaos and instability in South and West Asia.