Through its war against Afghanistan, U.S. imperialism has expanded its military operations and assaults across the region, daily pressing to assert what Washington considers its right to send its troops, warplanes, and ships where it wants, when it wants.

From extensive SWAT-style shoot-to-kill missions to get the "ragheads" as one British officer called the U.S. military missions in Afghanistan, to setting up air bases in Central Asia and Pakistan, to naval patrols from India to Somalia, Washington is extending its military, economic, and political tentacles across the region. Its aim is to hold together its domination over a disintegrating capitalist world order, as it represses working people resisting the effects of the world economic crisis. All that Washington has to offer people of the region is war, national oppression, and social crisis.

As the military tensions between India and Pakistan flare up and temporarily recede, working people in the United States, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere should demand the withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from Afghanistan and the surrounding countries. U.S. imperialism and its armed forces are the number one enemy of working people in the region. Uniting the toilers of the region to battle the growing imperialist military presence and domination is the only road to throw off foreign domination and press forward the national unification struggle on the Indian subcontinent.

Regardless of the specific issues behind the current military tensions, the source of the conflict between India and Pakistan is rooted in developments that occurred in 1947 when the departing British imperialists created Pakistan as a spearhead against the Indian revolution. Its divide-and-rule strategy was aimed at countering the powerful movement against colonial rule, including mobilizations by the country’s industrial proletariat, that was growing on the Indian subcontinent.

Armed and backed by Washington for decades, Pakistan remains a bulwark for imperialism against the battles by working people on the Indian subcontinent to address the unfulfilled tasks of national unification. The current Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has continued this close relationship with Washington, opening up the country’s air bases to U.S. forces and cooperating with U.S. military actions in Afghanistan.

The conflict between New Delhi and Islamabad aids the imperialist military drive in the region. Washington presses the Musharraf regime to crack down on opponents and "extremists," and takes steps to deepen its military and economic ties to New Delhi. The U.S. imperialists hope that India can be a potential counterweight to the Chinese workers state next door, giving it growing strategic and military importance to Washington. Before the world, U.S. officials pose as the rational peacekeepers shuttling between two somewhat hothead nations, covering up the fact that imperialism is responsible for the division of the subcontinent and conflicts arising out of the unresolved tasks of the national revolution.

The continuing conflict helps to lay bare the need to confront these tasks of the mighty revolutionary struggles that broke India’s colonial bondage and won the country’s independence from British imperialism in 1947. The partition of India and the formation of a pro-imperialist outpost helped block the formation of a modern, centralized nation-state.

Today the two governments use the divisions to turn workers and peasants away from a struggle against their common exploiters and oppressors. Each uses the issue to whip up chauvinist and communal hatreds among their peoples to divert attention from their failure to cope with internal social and economic problems. The Pakistani regime cynically claims to support the Kashmiri peoples’ aspirations, and uses the conflict to exert continuing military pressure on India and inflict a growing death toll in the area.

By helping to get out the truth about imperialism’s brutal record in the region and Washington’s continuing military drive today, working people around the world can weigh in the struggle to rid the region once and for all of the imperialist exploiters and their legacy of national oppression and division.
 
 
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