US IMPERIALISM is now beating the war drums as far as military intervention into Pakistan is concerned, with its leading officials ‘warning the world’ that the Taleban is now less than 50 miles from Islamabad and advancing all the time.
Leading the pack of the professional prophets of imminent doom is the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
She warned a House Committee on Wednesday that the Pakistani government was facing an ‘existential threat’.
She added that the Pakistani government is ceding territory and ‘basically abdicating to the Taleban and the extremists’ and has signed a deal handing the Swat Valley to the Taleban.
Clinton continued: ‘I think we cannot underscore enough the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing advances,’ adding for good measure that a nuclear Pakistan could pose a ‘mortal threat’ to the United States and other countries.
The message is clear, Pakistan with its nuclear weapons is falling into the hands of the Taleban and must be rescued whatever the cost.
That this is the cue for Admiral Michael Mullen the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make his entry is obvious.
He is, by accident no doubt, on a visit to the Pakistan military at this very moment.
He is following up on a visit by the architect of the war that destroyed the Yugoslav Federation, Richard Holbrooke.
The business of Holbrooke and Mullen is to organise the Pakistani military and the opposition parties for a military coup to ‘save Pakistan’, and to decisively put an end to all of ‘yesterday’s’ US propaganda about having democratic governments everywhere.
The job of a new military regime will be to plunge Pakistan into a civil war, and create the conditions where thousands of US and UK troops will be invited in.
Already the work of Holbrooke and Mullen is paying off. Yesterday, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, chief of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl, a religious party, said that the Taleban is heading for Islamabad.
‘You talk about Swat and Buner, but according to my information, they have reached much closer,’ he said.
Also on Wednesday, the main opposition party, which had initially supported the Swat deal, openly criticised the agreement.
‘The last few days show that gun-carrying Taleban are spreading to more areas and eventually want to capture the whole of Pakistan,’ said Khawaja Asif, a leader of the Pakistan Muslim League.
However, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, has stood up to oppose the Clinton recipe for US and UK military intervention.
He said that the Swat Valley is ringed by mountains and isolated and that the government was trying to bring peace by reaching accommodations with tribal groups, just as the US forces did in Iraq.
‘To think that that strategy somehow represents an abdication of our responsibility towards our people and towards the security of our country and the region is incorrect,’ Haqqani said.
Clinton meanwhile has called on Pakistanis, Pakistani-Americans and others to ‘speak out forcefully’ in an effort to change the attitudes of the Pakistani government.
Tens of thousands of US troops are on the way to Afghanistan and will be followed by several thousand British troops.
There is little doubt that these troops will be used in Pakistan.
British workers must however act to oppose any new military adventure by the US-UK. They must take to the streets and demand ‘hands off Pakistan’ and that all British troops be withdrawn from the region.