The ferocity
of irregularly regular terrorist attacks in Pakistan has become a
festering wound on the body politic of the country. Malaise and despair
stalk the land. Yet for the masses at large the ever-raging futile
debate amongst the dominant intelligentsia on this issue has only served
to confuse rather than clarify this curse. It is, therefore, crucial to
separate the essential from the inessential and grasp the core of the
problem.
The ferocity
of irregularly regular terrorist attacks in Pakistan has become a
festering wound on the body politic of the country. Malaise and despair
stalk the land. Yet for the masses at large the ever-raging futile
debate amongst the dominant intelligentsia on this issue has only served
to confuse rather than clarify this curse. It is, therefore, crucial to
separate the essential from the inessential and grasp the core of the
problem.
It is not just the physical trauma of those who
are the direct victims of this menace but also the psychological wounds
that are inflicted upon the masses as a whole that demoralise workers,
repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure
the revolution.
Violent struggles can be based on diametrically
opposed motives. The present spate of violence in Pakistan has a complex
aetiology and even more dubious perpetuators. The bosses behind this
orgy of bloodshed may not be only those we are manipulated to assume are
responsible.
This terrorism has a formidable economic base and
has morphed into an enormously lucrative enterprise. Suicide bombings
and terrorist attacks are extremely expensive affairs. Those investing
in them must be extracting exorbitant profits. No capitalist would ever
invest so heavily for reasons of piety alone.
It all started with
the imperialist counter-revolutionary insurgency in the region where
drugs and other criminal networks were systematically set up to finance
their dollar jihads. Everywhere they intervened, the imperialists set up
such financial networks. Honduras, Vietnam, Nicaragua and so on are
just a few examples.
In Af-Pak this network has been expanding for
the last three decades and has become a massive accumulation of capital
in the form of a black economy that is three times the size of
Pakistan’s formal economy. Ransom, murder, extortion, robberies,
corruption and other criminal activities also heavily contributed to
this primitive accumulation. The so-called ‘non-state actors’ are the
cancerous outgrowth of this non-state Mafiosi economy. Sections of the
state are involved in this black capital with vested interests and
terrorism is often instigated to protect these interests.
In
addition, acts of terrorism also reflect the infighting between
constantly splintering factions of terrorist outfits run by religious
and sometimes not so religious warlords. This terrorism is multipronged
and with frequently changing loyalties as the social and economic
conditions further decay. The motives may be partially or totally those
of financial greed rather than religious devotion, at least amongst the
bosses who run this madness. The involvement of different imperialist
states mixed up in this new great game is indubitable. But there are
also other forces involved.
According to a diplomatic cable sent
by the then principal officer at the US consulate in Lahore in November
2008, revealed through WikiLeaks, $ 100 million sent by the Saudi
monarchy and other reactionary gulf sheikhdoms was routed to some
clerics in southern Punjab. Part of the booty was used to recruit and
indoctrinate youngsters, turning them into jihadists and potential
suicide bombers. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The massive
cash pumped into these fundamentalist terror networks by these obscenely
rich and hedonistic rulers may never be revealed. The Arab despots are
terrified of the historic retribution for the brutalities they are
inflicting upon their subjects. They have used the Pakistan Army before
and plan to prop up these forces of dark reaction as a battering ram
against the mass revolts that can erupt against this tyranny.
In
1970, during the Palestinian uprising in Amman, Jordan, King Hussein
used contingents of the Pakistan Army under the command of Brigadier
(later General) Ziaul Haq to crush the revolt. More than 7,000
Palestinians were killed. The Israeli prime minister at the time, Moshe
Dayan, had sarcastically remarked: “King Hussein had killed more
Palestinians in 20 days than Israel had killed in 20 years.” The
Palestinians still commemorate the incident as ‘Black September’.
The
most agonising aspect of this raucous haranguing about terrorism is
that both liberal and fundamentalist analysts not only justify this
brutality of the state aristocracy but also try to drum up support for
it. Most soldiers being killed are from peasant and poor households. The
ordinary people of Pakistan are subjected to daily harassment and
torture by the police and other organs of state repression.
Extrajudicial killings are a norm. In Balochistan, innocent victims are
being picked up and their mutilated bodies thrown around. Economic
terrorism, with excruciating price hikes, unemployment and poverty is
being brazenly inflicted upon the toiling masses by the representatives
of this exploitative system. Hundreds if not thousands, mostly children,
are killed on a daily basis through hunger, malnutrition, starvation
and curable diseases through this economic genocide, to which the
callous elites are oblivious.
There are innumerable incidents in
history when ruling despots used terrorism to dispel and distract mass
revolts against them. Leon Trotsky elaborated the opposition of the
workers movement against terrorism. “If we oppose terrorist acts, it is
only because individual revenge does not satisfy us. The account we have
to settle with the capitalist system is too great…To learn to see all
the crimes against humanity, all the indignities to which the human
body and spirit are subjected, as the twisted outgrowths and expressions
of the existing social system, in order to direct all our energies into
a collective struggle against this system — that is the direction in
which the burning desire for revenge can find its highest moral
satisfaction.”
The terrorist insurgency ravaging Pakistan is
rooted in the foundations of this economic system of dearth and the
structures of the state that have grown from it. The further crumbling
of this economic edifice instigates even greater conflicts and
contradictions within the state and society. Misery, poverty and
deprivation also add to the frustrations, uncertainties and alienation
that drive primitive minds in periods of social stagnation to this
lunacy of bigotry and fanaticism. The black economy facilitates and
greases this process.
Without the obliteration of the political
economy that breeds terrorism, this infinite war of attrition will
continue to pillage society. It is the distilled essence of the sickness
and organic crisis of Pakistani capitalism. A vast majority of the
population is seething with revulsion against fundamentalist barbarity
and imperialist brutality. As the oppressed masses rise up in revolt,
state and non-state terrorism will be unleashed by the threatened
liberal and conservative ruling classes to crush the revolutionary
upheaval. But once the working classes unite in a formidable class
struggle and enter the arena of history with a Marxist-Leninist
leadership, they will be invincible.
