Vol. 73/No. 12      March 30, 2009

In addition, the White House is now discussing drone strikes into Pakistan’s southwest province of Baluchistan for the first time, the New York Times reported. In their sights is the area in and around the city of Quetta, the provincial capital, from where Taliban forces led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, former head of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, are reportedly launching attacks into Afghanistan.

On March 15 a Hellfire missile struck a site in the town of Jani Khel in the Bannu District of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) for the second time since December, when U.S. missiles first hit the province. Other U.S. attacks in the country have targeted areas adjacent to the NWFP in what is called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

Some 25 bodies have been retrieved from four sites hit by U.S. drones in the Kurram Agency in the FATA three days earlier. Six people remain missing, likely buried under the rubble, and about 50 others were injured.

The March 12 attack ranks among the deadliest drone attacks since the U.S.-led war in the region began in 2001. Two other strikes, on February 14 and February 16, took a similar toll, killing at least 30 people each.

The March 12 attack was the second time a site in the Kurram Agency was targeted. The first time was the February 16 attack, which reportedly hit a Taliban compound in an Afghan refugee camp, where, according to Pakistan’s Daily Times, “only a few poor families” still lived.

Prior to the recent attacks in Bannu and Kurram, U.S. strikes had focused on areas in the Bajur, North Waziristan, and South Waziristan agencies of the FATA.  
 
Conditions in ‘tribal areas’
The FATA of northwest Pakistan remains very economically and culturally undeveloped. The population is 97 percent rural, but only 7 percent of the land is cultivated. The majority of the cultivated land in this mountainous region is not irrigated. More than 80 percent of land in the FATA is not cultivable. The large majority of the population lives in poverty with no access to electricity or basic health care, and more than 80 percent remain illiterate.

This majority-Pashtun area is governed under the executive authority of the president through appointed government agents. Local governance is implemented though government-paid maliks (tribal chiefs) and other tribal and clan heads. Criminal cases and civil disputes are decided under their authority.

The British-imposed Frontier Crimes Regulations of 1901 remains the law of the land. Under the draconian codes, all political actively is illegal and the government can imprison anyone without charges; there is no bail. Collective imprisonment and other punishments are meted out for family members of the accused, including children. Punishments often include confiscation of property and burning down of homes.

The Pakistani government has a long history of using reactionary Islamist movements to further the interests of the country’s ruling class. Increasingly the state imposed religious strictures to enforce its class rule and keep working people divided. Initially this course was carried out, in part, as a counterweight to Pashtun nationalist movements in the NWFP and FATA, as well as resistance by Baluchis in Baluchistan Province to the southwest.

Later Islamabad established and armed Islamist forces to extend its political influence outside its borders. Islamabad, along with the governments of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and China, backed a loose coalition of rightist Islamist forces, referred to as the Mujahideen, against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Following that war Islamabad armed the Taliban (students) movement, drawn largely from government-backed Islamic schools in the majority-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan, in order to establish “stability” and secure its influence in Afghanistan.

Under pressure following Washington’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Islamabad launched a war against sections of the Taliban in Pakistan, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians.

Islamabad launched two major offensives last year: in the Swat District of the NWFP and in the Bajur Agency in the FATA. Pakistani paramilitaries burned thousands of homes to the ground. More than 400,000 people have fled Swat and Bajur, swelling the ranks of the homeless in other parts of the country.

In February, Taliban forces in Swat agreed to stop fighting in exchange for the implementation of sharia (Islamic) law there and in several other districts comprising some one-third of the NWFP. On March 10 pro-Taliban tribal heads in Bajur signed a peace agreement with the government and agreed to rein in Taliban fighters there.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s economy is showing signs of increasing volatility and a deep factional struggle between two major bourgeois parties—the Pakistan People’s Party of President Asif Ali Zardari and the Pakistan Muslim League (N) of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif—has threatened to further destabilize an already shaky government.

In mid-March the country’s top general, Ashfaq Kayani, stepped in to convince Zardari to accede to demands of the opposition. Faced with plans for a “long march” in the country led by lawyers, the federal government restored judges deposed under former military dictator Pervez Musharraf and announced it would request the Supreme Court lift its ban on Sharif and his brother Shahbaz from holding public office.

The government also said it would end federal rule of Punjab Province, where Shahbaz Sharif will be reinstalled as chief minister. It restored broadcasts of Geo TV news station, and lifted the imposition of section 144 of the criminal code. Section 144, established by the British Raj in 1860, bans political activity, including the gathering of more than four people in a public place.
 
 
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Imperialist troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq!
Marchers demand end to wars, deportations
U.S. gov't escalates Afghan war  
 
 
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