RedCeltic
12th June 2002, 06:09
U.S. Afghan war destabilizes area
Colonial legacy fuels crisis over Kashmir
By Fred Goldstein
As the clouds of war gather over the peoples of South Asia, Washington and its junior partners in London are projecting themselves as peacemakers. While lecturing on restraint, however, those who have been the historical and contemporary instigators of war and conflict on the Indian subcontinent are stepping up their imperialist intervention in the region.
The British have sent Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to the region and Washington is sending Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, allegedly to try to quiet the situation. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is to go to India and Pakistan the weekend of June 8.
Of course, both the Indian and Pakistani regimes are reactionary representatives of the exploiting classes of their respective countries. Both are trying to court U.S. imperialism to press their claims in the current crisis. And neither is truly interested in allowing genuine self-determination for the people of Kashmir--that is, the right of the people to choose, without pressure from Pakistan or India, what relations to have with their neighbors, including the option of complete independence without the interference of U.S. or British imperialism.
The present crisis was precipitated when anti-Indian forces, presumably Islamic fundamentalist forces associated with Pakistan, carried out an attack on Indian soldiers' families near a garrison in Indian-occupied Kashmir. The background to this attack is a 55-year-old dispute over the status of divided Kashmir. More immediately in the background is a series of massacres in which perhaps a thousand Moslems have been killed and many left wounded and homeless in Gujarat, India. The attacks have taken place with the complicity of the ruling right-wing nationalist party, the Bahratiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
At present there is room for wide speculation about the military-diplomatic maneuvering behind the war moves of both sides. Certainly, the attitude of U.S. and British imperialism has clearly been to tilt towards India and to keep up a steady drumbeat of warnings to the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf to stop the attacks on the Indian presence in Kashmir.
This one-sided emphasis up until now is quite remarkable given that India has threatened to initiate a conflict that could result in nuclear war. It has mobilized 700,000 troops near the border, with 2 million more on alert, and it has vastly superior weaponry. Clearly the right-wing nationalist regime of Vajpayee has put the Musharraf government's back against the wall in the present situation. As of this writing, Vajpayee of India has refused all offers of negotiations.
If Washington were seeking to be even-handed, and not trying to manipulate the crisis to its advantage in its fraudulent "war against terrorism," it would be quite simple for the capitalist press and the State Department to denounce "intransigence" and "bullying" by India in such a dangerous situation. But that is not happening.
Washington uses war threat to squeeze Pakistan
Indeed, the Austin, Texas-based think tank Stratfor, which has sources in the Bush administration, put out a report on May 28 indicating that the U.S. had used the threat of allowing an Indian attack on Pakistan to force the Pakistani government to let the Pentagon put U.S. troops on Pakistani soil. This despite the political risks to Musharraf.
"While publicly seeking to defuse the crisis," wrote Stratfor, "Washington used the Indian threat to change the equation for Pakistan. Officials made it clear that, in fact, permitting al Qaeda to operate in Pakistan is a greater threat to regime survival [the new U.S. term for threatening the overthrow of a government--F.G.] than permitting U.S. forces to operate against al Qaeda. If India attacked Pakistan and the United States remained neutral or actively participated, the consequences for Pakistan would be catastrophic.
"Musharraf conceded and U.S. forces entered Pakistan. Obviously, with India and the United States involved, Musharraf had to reevaluate the value of his nuclear capability. The United States clearly had the ability to destroy Pakistan's nuclear facilities more effectively than India might. When Washington announced a shift in its nuclear policy to permit first strikes, Pakistan was the unmentioned target."
While this information has not appeared in the capitalist press, it is consistent with the orientation of the Bush administration, both in the present crisis and in the recent period. Washington has sought to bring the Indian ruling class more firmly into its camp. Rumsfeld met with Indian officials and promised to sell New Delhi advanced radar systems for the first time. In May for the first time there were joint U.S.-India military exercises.
Of course, Washington could completely shift overnight if it had to act to bring the Vajpayee government into line.
The problem for the U.S., since it forced him into collaboration, is how to pressure Musharraf without bringing about his demise. The supreme criterion for managing the crisis as far as Washington is concerned is its own imperialist interests.
The primary concern in Washington is the war in Afghanistan, which requires Pakistani collaboration. This has to be coordinated with the struggle against the Palestinian national movement and all the machinations that have to be carried out to try to impose a protectorate on the Palestinian people. Then there is the planning for a war against Iraq, which has been postponed but undoubtedly not shelved permanently; the deepening intervention in the Philippines; the war against the Colombian liberation forces; planning the next coup against the militant progressive regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and all the other undisclosed plans for war and intervention on the drawing boards of the Pentagon and the CIA.
Bush has his own war plans
This India-Pakistan conflict has flared up and interfered with the war program of the Pentagon. Washington is trying to get things back on track and avoid a disastrous destabilization of the region. In the process of getting back on track, the Bush administration, via Armitage and Rumsfeld, will use the crisis to further their own war aims.
To really understand this conflict, it is of limited use to look only at the present maneuvers of the various powers involved. In fact, what London and Washington have done for generations set the stage for the present conflict. They fanned the flames of national, religious and ethnic conflict; they promoted reactionary forces while encouraging the suppression and extermination of progressive and revolutionary forces; they poured weapons and CIA agents into the area, and, most recently, they have carried out a massive war of terrorism against Afghanistan, with a destabilizing effect on the entire region.
The conflict over Kashmir itself is a ticking time bomb, a legacy of the British-inspired partition of India in 1947. The British colonialist art of divide and rule was brought to perfection after India was conquered by the British East India Company in the 18th century. England was a small island with advanced productive forces and weapons but limited population. In order to rule the vast continent of India, the British ruling class had to devise ways of pitting state against state, people against people, religion against religion, in combination with brute force and iron repression.
Partition and the fate of Kashmir
The British developed a strategic plan to foment country-wide Hindu-Moslem division as far back as the end of the 19th century, when the British colonial authorities first began to feel the rumblings of the Indian national movement for self-rule following the Great Rebellion of 1858.
Partition was the final result. It had been 50 years in the making. The creation of India and Pakistan was the last edict of the British colonial office before London formally relinquished its rule over India under the impact of the mass, anti-colonial movement.
The justification for the formation of Pakistan as a haven for Moslems was the persecution they suffered as a minority in India at the hands of reactionary sections of the Hindu ruling class. But it was the British who promoted the advancement of the Hindu ruling class with its caste system of oppression. These same colonial authorities encouraged discrimination against Moslems and played on this persecution to set up an antagonism that would divert the mass struggle away from the class domination of the imperialist ruling class and the indigenous ruling classes--the landlords and the capitalists--into a religious one.
The colonial office over a long period laid the basis for the antagonisms that resulted in the suffering of millions at the time of partition. They have been reignited in recent years by the Congress Party and, in an extreme form, by the right-wing BJP.
At the time of partition the British announced they were leaving and decreed that all majority Hindu states under direct British rule go to India and all majority Moslem states go to Pakistan. Princely states could belong to whichever country the ruler chose.
The feudal maharajah in Kashmir sat on the fence for a period. He jumped to India once a struggle broke out over Kashmir and his rule was endangered. The British military officer corps participated on both sides in this struggle.
Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan. India got the major and most developed section. In the Indian-occupied territory, a Moslem majority was ruled by a Hindu feudal aristocratic dynasty. The Indian government promised a plebiscite to determine the will of the Kashmiri people, but it never took place and the Indian bourgeoisie gradually consolidated its repressive rule.
The struggle over Kashmir has dominated relations between the two countries since 1947. It was easier for the imperialists to control two smaller states than one large one, and even easier to subjugate the peoples of the subcontinent by seeing that the conflict over Kashmir was never resolved.
This legacy of British imperialism was inherited by U.S. imperialism, which absorbed the British Empire after World War II as a weakened Britain withdrew from positions in the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and Central Asia.
U.S. brought nuclear horror to the world
If U.S. imperialism is now trying to become the "mediator" to keep a massive war from breaking out, it is not because of sympathy or concern for the masses of India and Pakistan. After all, this is the government that carried out the only nuclear attacks in history in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, when the capitalist media describes the horribly destructive force of the nuclear bombs in the Indian and Pakistani arsenals, they quantify their destructive power by comparing it to the devastation wrought by Washington's nuclear bombing of Japan.
The U.S. ruling class brought the world to the edge of nuclear conflict when it threatened nuclear war with the Soviet Union in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. It is only because one faction prevailed over another in the Oval Office and the Pentagon war room that the world was spared a nuclear holocaust. The crowd in the Bush administration today is to the right of the Kennedy administration in 1962. In fact, the government recently released a Nuclear Posture Review advocating the expanded use of nuclear weapons.
All the progressive forces of India, Pakistan and Kashmir are opposed to having the colonizers insert themselves into the present situation. But the reactionary bourgeois regimes of Pakistan and India will compete with each other to gain the favor of Washington. This will strengthen Wall Street's and the Pentagon's stranglehold over the region in the long run and further their war plans.
- END -
Reprinted from the June 13, 2002, issue of Workers World newspaper
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [email protected] Subscribe [email protected] Unsubscribe [email protected] Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
Colonial legacy fuels crisis over Kashmir
By Fred Goldstein
As the clouds of war gather over the peoples of South Asia, Washington and its junior partners in London are projecting themselves as peacemakers. While lecturing on restraint, however, those who have been the historical and contemporary instigators of war and conflict on the Indian subcontinent are stepping up their imperialist intervention in the region.
The British have sent Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to the region and Washington is sending Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, allegedly to try to quiet the situation. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is to go to India and Pakistan the weekend of June 8.
Of course, both the Indian and Pakistani regimes are reactionary representatives of the exploiting classes of their respective countries. Both are trying to court U.S. imperialism to press their claims in the current crisis. And neither is truly interested in allowing genuine self-determination for the people of Kashmir--that is, the right of the people to choose, without pressure from Pakistan or India, what relations to have with their neighbors, including the option of complete independence without the interference of U.S. or British imperialism.
The present crisis was precipitated when anti-Indian forces, presumably Islamic fundamentalist forces associated with Pakistan, carried out an attack on Indian soldiers' families near a garrison in Indian-occupied Kashmir. The background to this attack is a 55-year-old dispute over the status of divided Kashmir. More immediately in the background is a series of massacres in which perhaps a thousand Moslems have been killed and many left wounded and homeless in Gujarat, India. The attacks have taken place with the complicity of the ruling right-wing nationalist party, the Bahratiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
At present there is room for wide speculation about the military-diplomatic maneuvering behind the war moves of both sides. Certainly, the attitude of U.S. and British imperialism has clearly been to tilt towards India and to keep up a steady drumbeat of warnings to the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf to stop the attacks on the Indian presence in Kashmir.
This one-sided emphasis up until now is quite remarkable given that India has threatened to initiate a conflict that could result in nuclear war. It has mobilized 700,000 troops near the border, with 2 million more on alert, and it has vastly superior weaponry. Clearly the right-wing nationalist regime of Vajpayee has put the Musharraf government's back against the wall in the present situation. As of this writing, Vajpayee of India has refused all offers of negotiations.
If Washington were seeking to be even-handed, and not trying to manipulate the crisis to its advantage in its fraudulent "war against terrorism," it would be quite simple for the capitalist press and the State Department to denounce "intransigence" and "bullying" by India in such a dangerous situation. But that is not happening.
Washington uses war threat to squeeze Pakistan
Indeed, the Austin, Texas-based think tank Stratfor, which has sources in the Bush administration, put out a report on May 28 indicating that the U.S. had used the threat of allowing an Indian attack on Pakistan to force the Pakistani government to let the Pentagon put U.S. troops on Pakistani soil. This despite the political risks to Musharraf.
"While publicly seeking to defuse the crisis," wrote Stratfor, "Washington used the Indian threat to change the equation for Pakistan. Officials made it clear that, in fact, permitting al Qaeda to operate in Pakistan is a greater threat to regime survival [the new U.S. term for threatening the overthrow of a government--F.G.] than permitting U.S. forces to operate against al Qaeda. If India attacked Pakistan and the United States remained neutral or actively participated, the consequences for Pakistan would be catastrophic.
"Musharraf conceded and U.S. forces entered Pakistan. Obviously, with India and the United States involved, Musharraf had to reevaluate the value of his nuclear capability. The United States clearly had the ability to destroy Pakistan's nuclear facilities more effectively than India might. When Washington announced a shift in its nuclear policy to permit first strikes, Pakistan was the unmentioned target."
While this information has not appeared in the capitalist press, it is consistent with the orientation of the Bush administration, both in the present crisis and in the recent period. Washington has sought to bring the Indian ruling class more firmly into its camp. Rumsfeld met with Indian officials and promised to sell New Delhi advanced radar systems for the first time. In May for the first time there were joint U.S.-India military exercises.
Of course, Washington could completely shift overnight if it had to act to bring the Vajpayee government into line.
The problem for the U.S., since it forced him into collaboration, is how to pressure Musharraf without bringing about his demise. The supreme criterion for managing the crisis as far as Washington is concerned is its own imperialist interests.
The primary concern in Washington is the war in Afghanistan, which requires Pakistani collaboration. This has to be coordinated with the struggle against the Palestinian national movement and all the machinations that have to be carried out to try to impose a protectorate on the Palestinian people. Then there is the planning for a war against Iraq, which has been postponed but undoubtedly not shelved permanently; the deepening intervention in the Philippines; the war against the Colombian liberation forces; planning the next coup against the militant progressive regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and all the other undisclosed plans for war and intervention on the drawing boards of the Pentagon and the CIA.
Bush has his own war plans
This India-Pakistan conflict has flared up and interfered with the war program of the Pentagon. Washington is trying to get things back on track and avoid a disastrous destabilization of the region. In the process of getting back on track, the Bush administration, via Armitage and Rumsfeld, will use the crisis to further their own war aims.
To really understand this conflict, it is of limited use to look only at the present maneuvers of the various powers involved. In fact, what London and Washington have done for generations set the stage for the present conflict. They fanned the flames of national, religious and ethnic conflict; they promoted reactionary forces while encouraging the suppression and extermination of progressive and revolutionary forces; they poured weapons and CIA agents into the area, and, most recently, they have carried out a massive war of terrorism against Afghanistan, with a destabilizing effect on the entire region.
The conflict over Kashmir itself is a ticking time bomb, a legacy of the British-inspired partition of India in 1947. The British colonialist art of divide and rule was brought to perfection after India was conquered by the British East India Company in the 18th century. England was a small island with advanced productive forces and weapons but limited population. In order to rule the vast continent of India, the British ruling class had to devise ways of pitting state against state, people against people, religion against religion, in combination with brute force and iron repression.
Partition and the fate of Kashmir
The British developed a strategic plan to foment country-wide Hindu-Moslem division as far back as the end of the 19th century, when the British colonial authorities first began to feel the rumblings of the Indian national movement for self-rule following the Great Rebellion of 1858.
Partition was the final result. It had been 50 years in the making. The creation of India and Pakistan was the last edict of the British colonial office before London formally relinquished its rule over India under the impact of the mass, anti-colonial movement.
The justification for the formation of Pakistan as a haven for Moslems was the persecution they suffered as a minority in India at the hands of reactionary sections of the Hindu ruling class. But it was the British who promoted the advancement of the Hindu ruling class with its caste system of oppression. These same colonial authorities encouraged discrimination against Moslems and played on this persecution to set up an antagonism that would divert the mass struggle away from the class domination of the imperialist ruling class and the indigenous ruling classes--the landlords and the capitalists--into a religious one.
The colonial office over a long period laid the basis for the antagonisms that resulted in the suffering of millions at the time of partition. They have been reignited in recent years by the Congress Party and, in an extreme form, by the right-wing BJP.
At the time of partition the British announced they were leaving and decreed that all majority Hindu states under direct British rule go to India and all majority Moslem states go to Pakistan. Princely states could belong to whichever country the ruler chose.
The feudal maharajah in Kashmir sat on the fence for a period. He jumped to India once a struggle broke out over Kashmir and his rule was endangered. The British military officer corps participated on both sides in this struggle.
Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan. India got the major and most developed section. In the Indian-occupied territory, a Moslem majority was ruled by a Hindu feudal aristocratic dynasty. The Indian government promised a plebiscite to determine the will of the Kashmiri people, but it never took place and the Indian bourgeoisie gradually consolidated its repressive rule.
The struggle over Kashmir has dominated relations between the two countries since 1947. It was easier for the imperialists to control two smaller states than one large one, and even easier to subjugate the peoples of the subcontinent by seeing that the conflict over Kashmir was never resolved.
This legacy of British imperialism was inherited by U.S. imperialism, which absorbed the British Empire after World War II as a weakened Britain withdrew from positions in the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and Central Asia.
U.S. brought nuclear horror to the world
If U.S. imperialism is now trying to become the "mediator" to keep a massive war from breaking out, it is not because of sympathy or concern for the masses of India and Pakistan. After all, this is the government that carried out the only nuclear attacks in history in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, when the capitalist media describes the horribly destructive force of the nuclear bombs in the Indian and Pakistani arsenals, they quantify their destructive power by comparing it to the devastation wrought by Washington's nuclear bombing of Japan.
The U.S. ruling class brought the world to the edge of nuclear conflict when it threatened nuclear war with the Soviet Union in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. It is only because one faction prevailed over another in the Oval Office and the Pentagon war room that the world was spared a nuclear holocaust. The crowd in the Bush administration today is to the right of the Kennedy administration in 1962. In fact, the government recently released a Nuclear Posture Review advocating the expanded use of nuclear weapons.
All the progressive forces of India, Pakistan and Kashmir are opposed to having the colonizers insert themselves into the present situation. But the reactionary bourgeois regimes of Pakistan and India will compete with each other to gain the favor of Washington. This will strengthen Wall Street's and the Pentagon's stranglehold over the region in the long run and further their war plans.
- END -
Reprinted from the June 13, 2002, issue of Workers World newspaper
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [email protected] Subscribe [email protected] Unsubscribe [email protected] Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)