It took a year-long mass uprising by virtually the whole population of Pakistan to finally overthrow the hated military dictator General Musharraf. This unique book is a diary of that struggle by one of its most courageous participants.
With the exception of a handful of wild collapsed states, Pakistan is probably today the most volatile society in the world: the weakest link in the world chain. Since it is also to a great extent the pivotal fulcrum upon which US imperialism is resting in its so-called “war against terror” (more properly, its war against the oil-producing nations), the fate of the whole world largely depends upon how events play out there.
From the start, Pakistan was a monstrosity of a state. Born in a conflagration of communal frenzy, it was an utterly unviable entity, composed of two halves with nothing more substantial than a common religion to connect them, separated by a thousand miles of hostile territory. Millions were slaughtered to create it, as a direct result of a fiendish imperialist conspiracy to cut across the solidarity of a sub-continental-wide national liberation uprising.
Once established, the new state was an abortion. Created out of a communal fantasy lumping together “Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Iran, Sindh, Tukharistan, Afghanistan, Baluchistan ” (which gave this artificial construct its clumsy acronym), it never seriously pursued its inflated pretensions to extend its terrain to Iran, Tukharistan or Afghanistan, nor even to Kashmir. It cut a river of blood through Punjab, and has barely managed to maintain a feeble grip on Sindh – to say nothing of Baluchistan or the North-West Frontier Province (Afghania), which are nominally provinces of Pakistan, but where over huge tracts the government’s writ does not run and its armies hardly dare venture. And yet Pakistan emerged from a bloody birth carrying on its back the bleeding half of a ravaged Bengal to which it had never previously laid claim, at a distance of a thousand miles: a people with a distinct culture, language and history, who outnumbered their co-subjects and from the start bitterly resented their annexation by the distant feudal overlords of Punjab. To drag East Bengal into a state dominated by West Punjab was completely unviable, and the secession of Bangladesh was as inevitable as the revolt of the Philippines against Spain. At the very first opportunity, the East Bengalis tore themselves free, though only at the cost of three million lives.
The creation of Pakistan was a blunder even more misconceived and even less viable than that other communal statelet established almost simultaneously… Israel. And its 60-year history has witnessed the burial of an even greater number of victims in the two states’ respective consequential futile wars.
Pakistan could only survive by accepting the humiliating role of a US client state throughout the Cold War, fighting surrogate diplomatic and military wars, first against Soviet-patronised India and later against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. In the process Pakistan was forced to stagger under the weight of a constantly swelling tumour, in the form of a crazed clerical-fascist military intelligence state-within-a-state. Among the horrors spawned by the ISI, its coffers swilling with dollars, was al-Qaida, the most notorious of its creatures. Every al-Qaida atrocity bears the hallmarks of the ISI, the monster which the CIA nuzzled to its breast.
The succession of tumbling ex-Sandhurst tinpot military dictators swept away by defeat in the Bangladesh war, which at a stroke reduced the reach of the Punjabi feudal ruling caste by more than half, plunged what was left of Pakistan into revolution. Strikes, gheraos, uprisings, occupations, mutinies, millions on the march, impelled Bhutto the First – a suave playboy left holding the power following the unceremonious flight of the generals – virtually a hostage to the revolution played out on the streets. Bhutto found himself suddenly denouncing the rule of the “22 families” (including his own), and, until the movement began to subside, helplessly ratifying the democratic anti-feudal reforms already enacted by mass action on the ground. For these concessions he was never to be forgiven by the feudal elite. Barbaric revenge was soon to be inflicted by its vicious personification, the odious General Zia ul-Haq, in the form of an eleven-year reign of terror: mass hangings, torture and floggings. Bhutto personally was humiliated, tortured and hanged, and countless thousands publicly flogged into submission. Throughout that long dark night of torture, an entire generation of workers and peasants never forgot that brief glimmer of human hope that they had experienced in those earlier days: that faint spark of expectation that they might one day rise above the level of brute pack-animals. That is the basis of the continuing, though successively tarnished, Bhutto name, and the waning appeal of the PPP, despite the fact that whenever it was returned to power following the fall of yet another general, it cosied up to the US embassy and betrayed once again the people’s illusions. Pakistan has thus continued its tawdry cycle of blundering pantomime military dictatorships, interspersed with brief chaotic interregnums of corrupt quasi-parliamentary regimes.
With the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the collapse of the USSR, and the rise in the shape of al-Qaida of a new enemy raised and fed from within its own banks and embassies, US imperialism found itself in the humiliating position of having to depend upon a despised and universally derided military dictator who finally had no hope of clinging even to the last trappings of power for more than a matter of weeks; on a military machine incapable of even encountering, let alone defeating, its enemies; and on an intelligence apparatus half of which continues to support the other side.
Today we see in Pakistan not only the weakest link in the worldwide chain, but a rapidly developing revolutionary situation too. In writings almost reminiscent of those of John Reed (the brilliant American on-the-spot reporter in Russia in October 1917 who chronicled what he called the “ten days that shook the world”), Farooq too has graphically brought to life in these pages a revolution in the making: the masses’ heroic expression of anger, solidarity and growing determination.
For now, their hopes have once again been betrayed by the party of the feudal dynasty which through an accident of history came to be entrusted with them (the PPP), and cynically exploited by its gangster-businessmen rivals (the MLN). The leaders of both these parties were united in common dread of the mass movement that was to sweep them into power in a brief coalition, and who even resorted to propping up the tottering dictator for a last few months before he finally had to go.
I have had the privilege of knowing Farooq Tariq as a comrade and friend, together with the pioneers of what later became the Labour Party of Pakistan, for 28 years. In 1980, on behalf of a worldwide network of socialists called the Committee for a Workers’ International, I visited a group of Pakistani opponents of General Zia who had been forced into temporary refuge in the Netherlands. In 1982, Farooq and his comrades were arrested by the Dutch police on trumped-up charges of “conspiracy to hi-jack an aircraft”. The blame for this ridiculous accusation belonged not to the Netherlands authorities, who were acting in good faith on a false tip-off, but to the dirty-tricks brigade of the Zia gangster dictatorship. Farooq and his comrades were fully exonerated and went on to launch one of the most successful underground resistance propaganda newspapers ever seen, Jeddo-jihad (Struggle), which operated as a militant faction of the Pakistan People’ Party.
With the fall of the Zia regime, the group made an instant impact back home. It was just at this time, however, that the CWI internationally suffered a split which had damaging repercussions in Pakistan along with all the other countries where it had a base. Soon afterwards both the contending factions of the CWI were to sever their connections with Farooq and his comrades.
From the very beginning, Farooq had shown that same combination of courage, energy, modesty, humour and quiet determination that has since won the Labour Party of Pakistan the loyalty of many thousands of super-exploited workers and peasants. Tempered in the crucible of sacrifice, solidarity and struggle, the LPP represents their best hope today. Will it succeed in taking up its rightful leadership of the masses’ struggle? From Farooq’s inspiring reports, it is clear that by its courage, its transparent honesty, and its brilliant tactical flair, it has captured the imagination of workers and peasants, at least in some areas, as well as that of a layer of professionals, in the form of the advocates’ movement. Will it be able to harness the energies of the masses now that they are once again on the move? Can it ultimately lead them to a decisive victory? And if not this time, then can it at least leave behind it a heritage and a lasting tradition which will ensure that the next wave of mass struggle starts from a higher level?
As Farooq would be the first to agree, this will be decided not just by tactics – by agitational brilliance – but also by theoretical and strategic vision. The movement in Pakistan has snatched away from socialist commentators around the world the luxury of comfortable platitudes and abstract discussion, and forced them to focus on the constant crucial decisions of a living struggle. Finding the right means of balancing bold leadership of every democratic struggle, on the one hand, with clear warnings, sharply defined perspectives and a transitional programme, on the other, is precisely the science of revolution, as we see from the deeds of Lenin and Trotsky in Russia in 1917.
Pakistan in 2008 is of course not Russia in 1917. In Pakistan, counter-revolution in the form of mystical obscurantism already has a mass base, an ideological appeal and an army strong enough in wide swathes of territory to hold the state itself at bay. Conversely, unlike in Russia, the proletariat is relatively weak and scattered. The tireless militant workers of the LPP are facing a harder task. All the more glory to them for their success in building their authority in the struggle.
This authority is not limited to their role within the Pakistani working class. They are rightly building their prestige also internationally, through their contacts in the Indian sub-continent, South-East Asia, the Pacific region, Australia and Europe. Within their own modest limits, socialists internationally share a duty to observe, discuss and support their comrades of the LPP, both practically and in terms of theoretical discussion and an exchange of ideas. We have a lot to learn from their experience. Before too long, we will all be facing similar difficult questions.
Roger Silverman
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Roger Silverman 