PASHTUNS POSE A THREAT TO ALL – INCLUDING THE FINAL WESTERN MANOUVRES TO SAVE NEOCOLONIALISM

One thing is now certain. Pakistan has this year clearly entered the final leg of its permanent decline and the results can be expected as early as the beginning of next year. Pakistan has always been hard to justify in an ethnic, cultural and historical context; it is a quirk of history that has its twisted roots in the nature of turbulence of the “interface” between Central Asia and subcontinental India. But whatever it was, during its 60 years so far, it has served one purpose amicably well and that was serving the key post-colonial regional designs of its Anglo-American imperialist mentors. But it now seems that both the imperialists and their Taliban enemies may be rethinking Pakistan. Both had wanted to retain it united, but because of its internal systemic deterioration, and because the lines are being drawn for a multifaceted civil war, retaining Pakistan in a single piece may not be possible no matter what some may want.

The US has had consistent trouble with Pakistan since the unravelling of its post WW2 neo-colonial scheme began with 9/11 in late 2001, more so now as Pakistan’s eroded, Islamofascist gangster state and corrupt polity headed by its comprador Anglo-toady military, bureaucratic and political elite factions and classes is failing because its financial decrepitude (brought on by decades of plunder, misrule and mismanagement) and the internal group feuding and contradictions between contending factions in its mafia style power structures have finally reached critical mass. The West is seeking to change its Islamofascist aspect into an “Islamodemocratic” one, of which they are convinced Benazir and her PPP are the hallmark. The prospect of damage to Pakistan or its breakup would previously have been a nightmare scenario for the Anglo-American lobby and West, but in the present post-9/11 circumstances a terminally diseased corruption ridden but nuclear armed Pakistan descending into civil conflict and vulnerable to takeover by the oncoming Talibanisation in one of its provinces would be worse, so it might now be a desperate last resort option for the imperialists to facilitate the deliberate dismemberment of its other crucial, non-Talibanised parts so as to achieve the isolation of this influence which is Pashtun in origin – and “salvage” their “secular democratic character”. This could be on the current Western agenda.

The consolidation of the agriculturally important and industrially advanced Indian ethnic Punjab and Sindh (which I refer to combined as “Indian Rump Pakistan”) would be central to such a strategy and would pose no problem to it as those areas are ever willing to submit to US dictates – which would eventually guide them into rejoining India. The “modern” General Musharraf and his “liberal enlightened civil society”, MQM and newfound “popular” PPP allies would “democratically” ensure it. The West is working feverishly – and with a brash desperate openness heretofore unseen – to try and save the old corrupted neocolonial state arrangements at least in the pliant Indian “Rump” section, by causing the promulgation of the shameless NRO, whereby Musharraf is being made to accommodate Benazir, which arrangement the West thinks will be able to save Pakistan and its system, at least its crucial rump if not all. Though the Taliban elements do operate there when necessary, as seen in isolated events such as Lal Masjid and suicide bombing campaigns, their basis there is not socially sustained as it is in the N.W.F.P. However that doesn’t preclude any possible later developments. Pakistan’s Pashtun-connected Punjabi Islamofascist jihadi lobby is still very much alive, especially in the paramount army. That is why Musharraf is so important to the Western agenda. And Pakistan’s Indian ethnicities are historically know to submit to whoever gains the upper hand. The Northern Area districts of Gilgit-Baltistan may be considered restive as far as their usual political grievances and sectarian characteristics go, but they too otherwise present a picture of docile placidity. The intense and incessant traditional clamour of the Pakistani establishment over its “core policy issue” of Kashmir with India has strangely and very suddenly fallen silent over the past two years; Balochistan is in the grip of a determined separatist insurgency, but the sole focus of this is to procure its own secular nationalist independence, which is therefore not problematic at all for Western designs in the present situation – it would in fact be a potential ally and beneficiary.

In the meanwhile a traditional so-called “Pashtun nationalist” party called the ANP was recently chosen by the US as its main political tool for “secular” influence in the critical N.W.F.P, and the ANP + PMAP merger/alliance was further effected to this end, the idea being to cover the whole expanse of the “Pashtunkhwa” from Quetta to Dir, but this plan was overtaken and thwarted by the surprising and unexpected turns which the massive Talibanisation process lately took since its start in various forms and developments after 9/11. This upheaval first started in the form of the 2002 MMA electoral victory in the N.W.F.P and then its armed insurgency component took shape in the Waziristan tribal regions from 2003, and by 2007 Talibanism had started to bubble all over the rest of the FATA and settled areas of the province (excluding its Hazara district which is actually ethnic Punjabi). All of Pakistan’s political parties are a proven part of its establishment despite their loud claims to the contrary, and the ANP is no exception and with its vague “manifesto” it and other such parties now stand for very little in Pakistan’s turbulent Pashtun society, the culture of which is the wellspring for the nascent Talibanism, which can be termed as an outlook born of Pashtun culture. The backward looking Pashtuns, who were also former key US protégés in the 1980-90s Afghan Jihad, are presenting the Americans with a headache equal to if not greater than the prospects of the Pakistani system’s continuing decline. It seems that it never occurred to the always clever Americans that these people whom they armed and facilitated so wantonly and lavishly would subject them to more than the kind of terrible deeds for which the US once eulogised the Pashtun Mujahideen, when the Soviets were the victims. Neither did the US know that in laying the foundation of the Taliban in 1994, that they were enabling the birth of yet another paradigm in Pashtun socio-political development (or more correctly degeneration), one that would be the last and most dangerous. The Pashtuns express their extreme nature through their equally extreme religion of Islam, and can be said to constitute the largest criminal society on Earth. Their effects on their Persian and Indian peripheries throughout history have also been negative, and it is indeed this discordant influence upon the timid Punjabi and other North Indian Muslims that led to the so-called “ideology of Pakistan” and its creation. The West is now trying one last political ploy to tackle the Pashtuns within the old Pakistani system, to pacify the N.W.F.P and FATA by constituting “jirga” negotiations via Mullah Fazlur Rahman and his JUI-F party. The reality of the matter has, however, exceeded all such hopes and is now has an advanced momentum of its own – and the Pashtun component of Pakistan is now all but controllable.

The Pashtun Taliban in Pakistan are now a flourishing and autonomous grassroots popular movement in their own right within the rural main of Pashtun society, and are even independent of the control of their original JUI-F mentors. Only the major cities of Peshawar and Mardan in the N.W.F.P are still “free” of them, and that won’t be for long. They are emerging as the future of the Pashtun polity – as the ultimate evolue of the sum total of its socio-political and cultural expression. Over the Durand Line in eastern and southern Afghanistan, it is also the Pashtuns, also in their Taliban shape, who pose the main threat to the US and its plans to pacify that country. Both situations are one and the same, and the future Pashtun “national unity” will be in the form of a short lived jungle of a Taliban emirate and nothing else. (That is in itself enough to logically indicate the eventual fate awaiting the Pashtuns, their society and culture).

Like the corrupt, toady Indian ethnicities of Punjab and Sindh that form Pakistan’s majority, the ease loving, effeminate and wannabe-bourgeois Farsi-speakers of Afghanistan are also ever ready to meekly toe the line of Anglo-American imperialism and make peace with its plans as long as they can enjoy the sensual pleasures of life and money (unlike the feeling of the majority of their Iranian brethren, however).

Pashtuns and the international Al-Qaeda which they nurtured since the Afghan Jihad and continue to do in their homeland – are the main problem for their erstwhile Anglo-American imperial masters. The Pashtuns pose problems not only for their enemies but also for any potential friends and allies they may have – and also for their own good. To them only freedom matters most – and that is the freedom to live delinquently like ruffians and scoundrels, chaotically and lawlessly in the jungle, forever in the shadow of their precious Islamic creed.