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Pakistan-US relations

The class character of the relationship

The nature of our [Pakistan's] ties with the US

By M. Abul Fazl

Dawn

Pakistan's neo-colonial relationship with the US

We do not have to travel to a “banana republic” to study the neo-colonial phenomenon. We only have to make a dispassionate observation of our own society to arrive at a scientific definition of the term. For, seldom before has a nation of one hundred and seventy million souls managed the feat. But, as AJP Taylor says: ”Impossible is what one gets from history.”

The positive aspect of the problematique is that the clarification of a situation, the revelation of its inner laws of development, leads to clarity of thought and, therefore, to effective action.

The dictionary of political economy defines neo-colonialism as: ”Its origin lies in the inconsistency of the old colonial policy with the crumbling of the imperialist system. The material base of the existence of neo-colonialism is situated, in the first place, in the fact that the developing countries, which have integrated themselves with the system of international capitalist division of labour, continue to be economically dependent upon the imperialist countries and, secondly that the foreign capital, above all imperialist monopolies, preserve an important place in the economies of these countries.”(Economia Politica, Diccionario, Editorial Progreso, Moscu, 1985.)

This definition leaves out two important conditions:(a) there should exist, within the backward country, a class in whose own interest it would be to retain a client relationship with the advanced country concerned and,(b) the population should be de-politicised or, at least, kept out of politics.

Our neo-colonial relationship with the US is not a continuity of our relationship with Britain, though it is not entirely unrelated to it. Our old colonial status had oriented us to the Anglo-Saxon world. But we developed a neo-colonial relationship with the US as a result of our own internal developments from 1954 onward. Today it has matured and is undisguised. President Bush and Secretary Rice tell us of their preferences in Pakistan. The US ambassador and her staff feel no hesitation in making public their views about how Pakistan’s affairs should be managed. Persons from various political parties are incessantly calling on them to explain matters or solicit help.

The strongest emphasis in all these pronouncements, theirs and ours, is on moderation. This is not just in opposition to the creed of religious militants. It is also meant to exclude from the political discourse, any discussion of social changes, of a re-distribution of wealth.

The Pakistan Movement: a stir of the nascent Muslim bourgeoisie

The roots of our present situation can be traced to the nature of our struggle, or the lack of one, for independence. Muslim League was not a feudal organisation, as claimed by Nehru. It was the party of the nascent Muslim bourgeoisie. The economic basis of the upper-class Muslims of northern India was, mainly, the land, which, of course, does not increase. It was disappearing with the increase in inheritors. Its natural substitute as the field of economic activity would be the capitalist sector.

This was closed to them by the Hindu capitalists, who dominated this sector for historical reasons. As a substitute, the Muslims demanded quotas for themselves in government employment, as these could be created in state organisations but not in the private sector. Thus Hamza Alavi’s derisive remark about the struggle of the “salariat” is misplaced. State jobs are often the first step towards the embourgeoisement of the pre-capitalist class.

This crisis of feudalism existed in UP and Bihar. The Bengali Muslims’ struggle was more straight-forward – that of Muslim peasants against Hindu landowners. Thus the Muslims of these provinces were striving for participation in capitalist development, the road to which was closed to them. There was no such feudal crisis in Punjab and Sindh, where the landed class was comfortable due to the recent cutting of the canals.

The Muslims had to make no sacrifices for national independence. [Indpaedia editor's note: Not for Pakistan, true. But hundreds of Muslims were martyred and countless imprisoned while fighting for Indian independence.] In fact, very few took part in nationalist struggle after Gandhi practically ousted them from it by scuttling the non-cooperation movement of 1921 at its height. Even when the Muslims rallied around the Muslim League with the demand for Pakistan, their struggle could not acquire a mass character as the masses were not Muslim in the area of feudal crisis. They could only struggle constitutionally. Therefore, while the Congrs made sacrifices for freedom, the Muslim League bargained to get its share in it.

Newborn Pakistan lacked grassroots leaders

This placed Pakistan in a strange situation on its independence. The bulk of the party which had led the movement for Pakistan had been left in India. Those who were in Pakistan, or migrated from India, had no experience of organising or leading a mass movement. The government was, therefore, without a political tool to administer the country. Secondly, Muslim League had demanded Pakistan in order to create a national capitalist market for the rising Muslim bourgeoisie.

But the feudal class was very strong in West Pakistan. And it had been further strengthened recently when it drove away the Hindu money-lenders to whom it owed large sums. This feudal class prevented land-reforms and, ultimately, destroyed the nascent Pakistani industrial bourgeoisie. The party in East Pakistan was bourgeois but its influence on the central leadership was not strong.

Power passes to the civil and military bureaucracies

In this situation, effective power passed to the well-organised civil bureaucracy, which drew in its military counterpart too. The two bureaucracies, drawn mainly from the middle class, had a bourgeois outlook. They launched a state-financed and supported programme of industrialisation, which had, by the mid-sixties, got Pakistan well into the first stage of industries – textiles and other light manufactures and even started with the second stage. An industrial bourgeoisie also began to emerge as a class-for-itself. During this period, the civil-military bureaucracy not only kept the East Pakistani leaders away from power but had the upper hand vis-à-vis the West Pakistani feudal class too.

However, the two bureaucracies, not wanting to lose power, were opposed to the holding of elections. When a part of the civil bureaucracy did, nevertheless, collude with the East Pakistani politicians to frame a constitution and set the date for the first general elections, the army made a putsch and the bureaucracy seized power in its own name.

A client relationship with the USA

Before this, the bureaucracy sought a solution to the problem of defence against relentless Indian menace, not by mobilising the masses, an action which would have gone against its nature, but by entering into a military alliance with the US. This was done by the trio of Ghulam Mohammad, Iskandar Mirza and Ayub Khan in 1954, going over the political government’s head. The alliance brought us some arms but, like any alliance between a great power and a weak country, it served essentially the interests of the US. For example, it was on the US’s advice that we refrained from acting in Kashmir during the Sino-Indian war of 1962. Again, in 1965, we stopped just short of cutting India’s link with Kashmir under US’s threat. Lastly, the treaty did not save East Pakistan from Indian invasion. So much for the three foolish bureaucrats’ hare-brained scheme of taking arms from the US on the pretext of fighting communism and using them to take Kashmir.

This alliance, no doubt, created a client relationship with the US. But it was an uneasy relationship because a weak but growing industrial bourgeoisie was exerting a nationalist influence upon our policies. What provided a material basis for our slide from clientelism to a neo-colonial relationship with the US was the destruction of this national bourgeoisie by the People’s Party government, which came to power after the separation of East Pakistan.

The break-up was the result of the maturing contradictions of prolonged military rule. However, the civilian government which followed in West Pakistan was dominated entirely by the feudal classes of Punjab and Sindh, which were still powerful in the absence of effective land reforms in this wing.

The PPP, being a populist party, used the rhetoric of the Left to disguise its reactionary nature for a while. But its actions served the interests of the class it represented. It destroyed Pakistan’s weak industrial bourgeoisie by mass nationalisation of industries, but sparing the foreign capital in Pakistan and any capital working in partnership with foreign capital. It thus promoted the compradorisation of the remaining capitalist class.

Its sham “land reforms” actually increased the individual land-holdings. And all this was done in the name of “socialism.” This must be the only instance where socialism strengthened the feudal class and the comprador bourgeoisie, while destroying the national bourgeoisie. The attack on the latter was motivated by a desire to safeguard the power of the feudal class. But it blocked all prospects of Pakistan’s independent economic development.

The feudal leadership did not touch the army, whose alliance with the now mainly commercial and comprador bourgeoisies remained intact. However, they were not important enough to afford it an adequate social base. So it allied itself with the feudal class, too, while retaining the fealty of the mauled bourgeoisies.

The feudal class can be a good and loyal partner for colonial rule. But it cannot be a viable neo-colonial partner for a foreign power, as its links with the world capitalist market are not vital for its existence. A neo-colonial partnership can be provided only by a comprador bourgeoisie. In the face of the weakness of this class, the US’s alliance with Pakistan was reduced to an alliance with the Pakistan army. This development was all the more easy because, from the beginning, our alliance was dominated by the political rather than the economic instance.

The economic instance of the alliance is provided by our close links with the IMF-WB-WTO trio. Under its tutelage, we sell off our vital industrial assets, decide to specialise in textiles, the most primitive stage of industry, without any ambition to produce textile machinery, and open our economic space to the rampaging rentier capital. Our economic policy consists of building passages for others’ goods instead of making those goods ourselves. Indeed, we must be the only major country to take the globalisation prattle seriously. The reason is the transformed nature of the state.

The role of the bureaucracies, specially that of the army, was progressive until the end of the sixties. It was truly bonapartist, in that the army stood in for the bourgeois class until the latter could wield power itself. The decisive mistake it made was not to carry out drastic and effective land reforms. If that had been done, the succeeding regime, emanating from the general elections, would have been bourgeois and carried the country forward. In the absence of such reforms, the elections brought a reactionary leadership, which actually threw the country back.

The People’s Party has now been selected by the US to provide a political cushion to the army in the fight against the Taliban. It interprets it to mean that the army would share power with it. But if power is shared, it would not be power. Only the government can be shared, and the benefits that it affords. So, one supposes, bargaining and pressure tactics can bring it an agreement on a division of benefits but not a share in power.The important point is that, in all these quarrels, in all these pressures and manoeuvres, no social question has been raised by either side. There is no talk about serious industrialisation of the country, about the regeneration of a strong national industrial bourgeoisie, about land reforms. Not a breath about re-distribution. The masses are again outside politics. There is emphasis only on human rights, which, since they do not include the right to eat, become, essentially, an upper middle-class fad.

If the masses wish to seize politics as its subjects and not just objects, they would have to wage the struggle which they missed while getting national independence.