21st Century Imperialism: A Debate Within the Pakistani Left - (Part 1)
Illustration: Jamhoor
After a long interval, the 21st century has revived interest and support for Left politics in Pakistan. The Jamhoor team got together with leaders of Pakistan’s three major leftist parties – Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (Awami Workers’ Party), Ammar Ali Jan (Haqooq-e-Khalq Party) and Syed Azeem (Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party) to think through the challenges and opportunities faced by the Left within the current political and economic conjuncture.
As the balance of imperialist forces seems to shift across the world — with the US defeat in Afghanistan and China’s ever-growing role within the world economy and politics — the Pakistani Left is confronted with a host of dilemmas. How should it contend with a resurgent Afghan Taliban and militancy across the region in the context of US military defeat and withdrawal? How should it engage with Pakistan’s ‘evergreen friend’ China, and its ‘cold war’ against the US? How should it approach the role of Pakistan’s military and its machinations against rival imperialisms in the region? In short, what does anti-imperialism look like for the Pakistani Left today?
In tandem with these global political economic shifts, the deepening of the political crisis within Pakistan is a sign that alliances within the ruling class are shifting. The emergence of a new political vacuum presents the Left with another set of challenges and opportunities: How should it distinguish its anti-imperialism from the more popular right-wing anti-imperialist discourse of the PTI and TLP? Should it ally itself with mainstream liberal democratic forces or does that risk diluting its own politics? To what end should it engage with the electoral sphere?
By reflecting on the Left’s past and current confrontations with these questions, we hope to illuminate some of the emergent paths for Left politics in the 21st century.
We recognize that the panel’s male dominance partially reflects our team’s challenge in bringing together key women leftist leaders in a timely manner and partially the nature of the politics of leadership. On our end, we hope to rectify this omission with dedicated follow-up conversations in the near future. We also note that this interview was conducted before the unprecedented flooding disasters this year, and while our conversation touches upon issues related to the environmental crisis facing Pakistan, these questions have since assumed much greater urgency.
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The US After the Withdrawal From Afghanistan
Tayyaba: With the end of the US occupation of Afghanistan in 2021, and the return of the Taliban, the Pakistani Left and Pashtun nationalists took a range of different political positions, from being sympathetic to the US-backed Ashraf Ghani regime to supporting the Taliban as a potentially anti-imperialist force. How do you think the Left should have grappled with the American occupation, subsequent withdrawal, and Taliban takeover in Afghanistan?
Azeem: This debate dates back to 2001 when the US occupied Afghanistan. At that time, there were several different positions within the Pakistani Left. One position, held by many progressives, considered Pervez Musharraf a progressive liberal and were convinced that the ultra-conservative regime in Afghanistan, which was anti-women and anti-minorities, needed to be countered. So the Left had a very weak anti-imperialist position in the early 2000s. Most of them wanted the Taliban to go, so they supported the US invasion. This included Pervez Hoodbhoy and Taimur Rahman, for example. [Rahman has contested this claim. –Ed.]
With the exception of a few, most leftists either supported the war, or were silent at best. A lot of the left at the time was associated with the growing Western-funded NGO industry in Pakistan. Though we were a minority within the left, the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP) organized a long march, from Kasur to Sakhakot, condemning US imperialism.
Around 2006, when Musharraf’s popularity declined, and the occupation had not borne fruit, some more prominent people within the Left, like Aasim [Sajjad Akhtar], became openly critical of US policies in the region. At the time, the Pakistani Taliban were getting more active. When they took control of Swat and tried to implement Shariah, another liberal left position gained prominence: that the Taliban are the primary enemy, the principal contradiction. A third position held primarily by the Trotskyites, particularly Sartaj Khan and Dr. Riaz, celebrated the Taliban as an anti-imperialist force. While I disagreed with this position, it encouraged us to look at the class composition of the Taliban. In this regard, their analysis was noteworthy.
After witnessing the US failing in Afghanistan, and as a result of debates within the Left, a new middle position emerged, primarily from Farooq Tariq. While they were critical of the US, they declared that both the Taliban and the US were “equal enemies”.
My view at the time, which I clarified in my writing between 2010 and 2014, was that while both the US and the Taliban are our enemies, they are not at all equal enemies. One is the world's largest military machine, with immense arms, influence and economic power, and the others are dispersed tribes supported from here and there. So they can never be equated. US imperialism remains the principal contradiction, I argued.
In 2014, when drone attacks in Pakistan intensified, these same positions were reflected in the way different leftists reacted to the strikes. Leftists like Hoodbhoy and Taimur were supporting drone strikes, while people like us in the MKP were vehemently opposing them as forms of imperialist aggression.
Today, we need to look at things slightly differently. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan has taken place at a time when the US is no longer a hegemonic force. It still enjoys immense influence. But with the rise of China, we are entering a non-hegemonic phase. In this new context, the earlier positions should be re-analyzed. Even today though, I would argue that imperialism remains the principal contradiction.
While I support the end of the US occupation, the Taliban takeover is not good news for the people of Afghanistan. They are not a pro-people force, and therefore cannot be an anti-imperialist force. You cannot be anti-imperialist if you are not pro-people: these two things go hand in hand. The fight against imperialism, historically, rests on the shoulders of workers, peasants, and the marginalized sections. Wherever the bourgeoisie has led anti-imperialist movements, they have always been compromised.
A 2011 protest in Miranshah, North Waziristan against a US drone attack. Between 2004 and 2018, more than 2500 people were killed in the tribal areas of Pakistan as a result of 430 drone strikes. Image: Thir Khan/AFP
Ammar: There has been a debate within the Left about the exact role of the Pakistani state vis-à-vis imperialism, the Taliban, and Islamic extremism. In the 1980s, the debate was that Pakistan was a rentier state of the US in the Cold War, and it was using Islamic militants as proxies. This worldview was very easy to understand, and it informed much of leftist thinking in the twentieth century, particularly during the Cold War.
But all of this changed after the Cold War, especially after 9/11, when the contradictions between imperialism and militant Islam became sharper. Most of the Left at this point was experiencing a subjectivity of defeat. When I joined the Left, there were no serious discussions and perspectives about gaining power and winning, not even informally. Most of the analysis focussed on what the state should be doing. That is why large sections of the Pakistani Left morphed into something akin to civil society groups, like the civil rights movement in the US, where they were fighting for certain issues of social justice, but not asking how the people could win power.
This became an intense national debate after 9/11. One perspective was that the US is the mightiest military power in the world, and if it came to the region, it would be very difficult to fight and would cause immense destruction. The other perspective was that, despite the US being an imperialist power, Islamic extremism is the immediate threat faced by the Pakistani people because it would end any possibility of progressive thought in the country. They would give examples of Afghanistan where you had the possibility of a Left even under pro-Western governments, but once the clergy came to power, that possibility was annihilated.
First, over time, it became clear that people underestimated how the US presence and the War on Terror would impact local politics. Some of the biggest social movements in Pakistan over the last decade were crushed under the garb of the War on Terror. Farmers were arrested and charged with terrorism in the Okara military farmers’ movements led by the Anjuman Mazareen Punjab (AMP). Workers in the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM) in Faisalabad were tried by the anti-terror court and given life sentences for terrorism because they went on strike for one day to demand a minimum wage. There are many other such examples of the Pakistani state using the War on Terror as a fig leaf to crush movements – including those of students, women, katchi abadi (informal settlements) residents, etc.
The War on Terror was not limited to fighting extremists in faraway lands. It became a tool of managing populations internally, and created its own legal, military, and political logic. It decimated space for democratic participation. It is very difficult for any country to have democratic participation when it has been geared towards fighting other people’s wars for so long. Pakistan has been doing this since the 1950s.
Second, people came to recognize that the US is no longer a power that is even mildly interested in reconstruction and state-building, as it was in post-war Europe. The US has become a demolition squad that invades and destroys states, which is their new way of managing opponents in different countries. This has happened in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Sections of the Left mistakenly believed that America would build some semblance of a civil society and democracy in Afghanistan.
“It is very difficult for any country to have democratic participation when it has been geared towards fighting other people’s wars for so long. Pakistan has been doing this since the 1950s. ”
To end, and as Azeem bhai pointed out, we should keep in mind that contradictions always remain dynamic. At a structural level, there is an absolute contradiction, but when immediate battles are taking place, it becomes important to take certain sides, which one would not have taken in other circumstances. When Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), with its very anti-Western rhetoric, stormed the capital in 2017, 2018, and 2020 in an effort to run over the Pakistani state, the Left correctly pointed out that the state ought to stop them, even by force, because otherwise it would lead to a chaotic situation. While we are anti-authoritarian and anti-state, a TLP victory would not be liberation from the state. Rather, it would be the reproduction of the worst aspects of the Pakistani state and its toxic ideology.
Similarly, when the Taliban were coming back to power, there was room for the Left to give tactical support to groups that were willing to resist the Taliban regime, which is not only interested in fighting a foreign power, but is ideologically anti-minority, anti-women, and anti-development. In that sense, these contradictions remain dynamic, and there has to be a dialectical relationship between the permanent, structural contradictions, and the immediate tactical questions faced by the Left.
A Taliban fighter walks past a beauty salon with pictures of women defaced using spray paint in Kabul. Image: Gandhara/AFP
Aasim: First of all, I would strongly suggest that to put all of these myriad groups that we have talked about into the category of ‘Left’ is misplaced. Pervez Hoodbhoy is not of the Left. I do not know under what category you could call him a leftist. He is a liberal. This explains why he would be thankful for Americans coming to kill the Taliban. This worldview does not extend to questions of class or even development more broadly. Taimur Rahman is a slightly different, more complicated, category of opinion, because obviously he is very avowedly Left.
Nevertheless, when I was getting involved in the Left around the turn of the millennium, to be progressive meant to be secular. It did not mean to have a position on class or other forms of social polarization. It meant to talk about equal rights for minorities and women, nothing beyond standard liberal positions. And I think we are still saddled with this when we are thinking through what an anti-imperialist position should be, because a lot of our immediate everyday political positions, and even actual mobilizations, involve people who are liberals. So I think this is a constant question of self-reflexivity.
I fully agree with Azeem's description of an evolution. There were people in 2001 who unequivocally opposed the US intervention. We came out against the Iraq War in Pindi in 2003. It was not huge, but there were significant sections of the Left talking about resisting empire. Of course, within the metropolitan Left, this was an age where Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri were writing about empire and multitudes, and how there was no such thing as imperial wars anymore. There were elements of that playing out in Pakistan as well.
“While the Taliban have always enjoyed external support, they certainly were a rural insurgency.”
On the other hand, if you said anything about the Taliban being an organic force with rootedness in the rural countryside, which I was saying 20 years ago, you were immediately labelled a Taliban sympathizer. While the Taliban have always enjoyed external support, they certainly were a rural insurgency. Whether in Swat or Waziristan, their existence and sustenance cannot be explained by patronage of the religious right from the Pakistani state and military alone. But there was no space to have a nuanced position on this.
That persisted all the way through 2014 and 2015 with the Swat operation and with Zarb-e-Azb. Any position that was critical of military expeditions was seen as sympathetic to the Taliban. That has changed with the emergence of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), which crystallized those nuanced positions that had been pushed into very distant corners.
The American withdrawal from Afghanistan brings all of this into sharp relief. Those who, 20 years ago, thought that the invasion was a great idea no longer defend that position. As Ammar said, the War on Terror gave the state a mandate to do whatever it wanted under the guise of some nebulous idea of terrorism. Liberals even stopped articulating that kind of unconditional support for the state in the name of crushing terrorism around the time the PTM emerged.
Having said that, the PTM also reflected these tensions and contradictions. Now, unfortunately, it is post-facto, because PTM is effectively fragmented. Ultimately, it was an articulation of nationalist politics, in which you could name the Taliban, the Pakistani army and the empire, though the latter was the one you named the least. You saw that when the Ashraf Ghani regime fell and the Taliban reconquered. It took a few months for a sheepish acknowledgment that Washington facilitated all of this. They struck a deal with the Taliban to bring them back into power. This did not happen by chance but by design. Those who had not criticized American imperialism for 20 years were now forced to name the US as a major protagonist in this whole story. Otherwise the Americans had been seen, in a sense, as the good guys.
I think, partly the Left struggles with these questions because we ourselves straddle Left and liberal positions. A distinctly Left position would have talked about the economics of imperialism, which in Afghanistan, as Ammar said, was basically just a money-making machine in the name of war and reconstruction. I think those facts of imperialism were thoroughly underspecified, and shouldn’t just be post-facto pointed out. Instead, there should have been a clear articulation that even if we share certain viewpoints with liberals, there is a distinctly Left position and I think as Ammar was saying, this is the only way that the Left can become a meaningful contender for power. This is what we’ve struggled to do in the last twenty years or so.
Manzoor Pashteen addressing a PTM rally in Peshawar in 2018. PTM has become a symbol of Pashtun nationalism organizing against military excesses in the tribal belt of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Image: Dawn
Tayyaba: Aasim, can you articulate this distinctly Left position a bit more clearly?
Aasim: There is an analytical position which acknowledges that in the absence of a genuinely anti-imperialist force, the Right (the religious right or others like Imran Khan) may pose as anti-imperialists. Even if empirically they have some rootedness in working class populations, that does not mean they offer emancipatory political horizons. It just means that the working class is being attracted to fascism, like in Italy and Germany in the past. That is what Antonio Gramsci spent his entire prison years writing about. It is equivalent to how working and lower middle-class populations in Karachi were attracted to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s (MQM) politics. Once we have a clear analysis, we can assess how the right is stepping in to fill a space we are not occupying by selling vacuous slogans of anti-Americanism.
2. Imperialism and Politics on the Ground
Tayyaba: Having articulated your respective positions, how do you think they have played out on the ground? How is your political organizing influenced by your position on imperialism?
Aasim:: First, we have to go back in history to think about the last time that the Left was a meaningful contender for power in Pakistan or the region. A few decades ago, anti-imperialist politics was founded on two pillars. One was class, and the other was the national question. A crucial reason for the decline of Left politics domestically — aside from the end of the Cold War and the ‘end of ideology’ etc — was the decline of the politics of class. The Left ceded space in working-class neighbourhoods and issues to the Right, making progressive politics all about secularism, or a certain kind of politics of recognition rather than a politics of redistribution.
Second, over time, the national question has become more insular. We have nothing like the National Awami Party (NAP), a broad united front of anti-imperialists, socialists, and ethnic nationalists. Now you have Sindhi and Baloch nationalists in many different groups, often hating on one another for different levels of commitment to the nationalist cause. PTM was exciting precisely because it represented for a while a rehabilitated articulation of potentially anti-imperialist Pashtun nationalism. But, as we know, it did not quite reach its fruition and is now fragmented.
In organizing on the ground, our efforts have tried to address those two spaces where we have retreated. I work in Pashtun katchi abadis (informal settlements), where people are hardcore Deobandis and many of them probably have a soft corner for the Taliban. But if we had gone in there and asked, “What is your ideology?”, rather than, “What is the issue of dispossession around which we can organize?”, then we would not have made much progress. It would be naive to pretend that working-class neighbourhoods are automatically imbued with progressive ideals. Irrespective of ideology, one still tries to engage on class issues, and then over time, once you have developed deeper relationships, then you can challenge people on ideological issues and question their views about women, minorities, etc. This happened in our organizing work in Okara. I also talk about internationalism when I am organizing. The Left spends a lot of time doing politics on the national question, on the brutalization in peripheries like Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh or Gilgit-Baltistan. But most nationalists still do not trust us; they are wary of us trying to bring people together. So it’s an uphill battle but that does not mean that we stop.
A protest organized by the AWP against the eviction of residents of katchi abadis in Islamabad. Image: AWP
To reclaim that ceded space, we need to generate substantial working-class pockets of support, and try to move back towards progressive nationalist principles in the peripheries. Similarly, in metropolitan areas, a lot of Baloch, Pashtun and Sindhi youth who come to study almost always tend towards us but there is always a point beyond which we struggle to have our minds meet. But that is an ongoing challenge.
“it is both a moral and historical responsibility for the Punjabi Left to take a position in favour of Baloch, Sindhi, and Pashtun nationalists who are being targeted by the state.”
Ammar: Aasim has explained some of the main contradictions that one faces when dealing with allies internally around the question of imperialism. For example, it is both a moral and historical responsibility for the Punjabi Left to take a position in favour of Baloch, Sindhi, and Pashtun nationalists who are being targeted by the state. We do not have to agree with all aspects of their ideology. Unlike the ‘70s and ‘80s, when these were anti-imperialist projects, now there is considerable expectation amongst these nationalists for some kind of US support. Despite all of that, the level and the kind of brutality exercised against these groups makes it an absolute necessity to defend them.
At this point in time, it is very important to defend them from a perspective of solidarity, building a kind of broader coalition in the future, and not necessarily from a perspective of shared ideology. A lot of our friends in the PTM, as Aasim rightly pointed out, are not just soft on imperialism – some of them are pro-imperialism, pro-US. Despite that, when the PTM arrives in Lahore and there is a crackdown on them, it becomes a responsibility on the Punjabi Left to defend them. All of us have suffered because of our position on the PTM. These are questions of practice that will have to be resolved over time, keeping in mind the role of the Pakistani military and the Taliban in brutalizing many of these populations.
I believe that in politics one has to remain open to impossible alliances and impossible encounters. I say that not only with regard to alliances with nationalists, but also with civil society liberals. Whenever we have been in trouble, a lot of these NGOs, including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, have supported Left activists, knowing that we have a critical stance towards NGOs and the West. But they have stood by us, and if anything illegal happens to them, we raise our voices in support as well.
These are tactical alliances that are made in struggle, which should not be confused with the strategic horizons that every political entity has. For any human rights group funded by the West, the strategic horizon is to defend some idea of liberal democracy, with all the compromises that it entails. We encounter these groups in our struggle for a different kind of state and society, but momentarily we are also meeting because we are faced by the same mortal threat by an enemy that can annihilate us.
This is even true in working-class neighbourhoods. Recently, people from the TLP joined the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) because we launched a campaign on cleanliness in their neighbourhood. These people are Barelvis with a lot of extremist views. But when you are in a fight, let’s say against a government institution that is refusing to clean the neighbourhood, to provide clean water, gas and electricity or to improve the schools, then you go to the mosques, the churches, to anyone and everyone, to seek support. At the tactical level, that openness is very important.
Finally, we have to talk about engaging with the mainstream as well, considering that the Left does not have representation in the parliament and we are pushing for legislative reforms like the restoration of student unions. For that, one will have to engage with the mainstream parties that have the power to legislate. This is part of a rich history of leftists, like Mao and Lenin in some cases, critically and tactically engaging with ideological opponents, including state officials, and even imperialism. Considering the nature of the state, we will have to deal with mainstream parties. This may blur things at the tactical level, so we have to be clear about our strategic horizon, which is a fight for a socialist Pakistan.
Azeem: Ammar and Aasim have explained in depth the important practical problems we face on the ground. I will just refer to history and some Marxist theory to explain how I think we should be dealing with these very real problems. There are two types of contradictions: principal contradictions and other contradictions. For example, at one point, imperialism was supporting religious extremism. Then post-9/11, it started fighting the Taliban, and then, when the US was leaving Afghanistan in 2021, they once again supported the Taliban to facilitate their exit. While the principal contradiction – imperialism - remained throughout this time, other contradictions kept changing.
While dealing with other contradictions, if we are not clear about the principal contradiction, then our struggle can derail into narrow nationalism or very liberal forms of struggles against the Taliban etc. Even in practice, there is strategy, and there are tactics. Strategy is the program the Left wants to achieve: a socialist society, anti-imperialist struggle, a planned economy etc. If our tactics are not aligned with our strategy, that will derail us from achieving our ultimate goal and take us towards reformist, liberal politics.
That is the danger of dealing with day-to-day problems without having determined the extent to which we can fight these battles. For example, it was not wrong for the Left to have supported liberal democracy in Pakistan. We supported the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in the ‘80s and the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy in the 2000s. We still support struggles against the military or judiciary when they try to derail democracy, but the extent to which you do that depends on your strategy.
In terms of the national question, I was reading a very important article by Dr. Aziz ul-Haq from 1971, when there was a split within the Professors’ Group on the question of the military operation in East Pakistan. Dr. Aziz ul Haq led the group that supported the operation and split from Professor Azizuddin, who was leading those against the operation. He went on to form the People’s Youth Front and was murdered soon after.
“In those [post-colonial] countries, the question of national liberation comes on the shoulders of workers, peasants, middle classes, students..”
In the article, he explained this split, spelling out four different positions, which are relevant even today. His position was to support the resolution of the national question, but he was against the elites leading the national fight — people like Akbar Bugti, Wali Khan, etc. On the other hand, the Left that was opposed to the operation in Bangladesh was lending support to these nationalist leaders. We are once again at a similar juncture. After the ‘50s and ‘60s, after Fanon and the many national liberation movements of that time, it has become clear that the national bourgeoisie in post-colonial countries is not in a position to lead the historic task of anti-imperialism and liberation. In those countries, the question of national liberation comes on the shoulders of workers, peasants, middle classes, students, etc. National liberation requires them to fight for their democratic struggle against their national bourgeoisie. It is not possible for Wali Khan’s group to ever be anti-imperialist, and fight for the freedom of Pashtuns, or for the Baloch tribal leaders to win freedom for the Baloch. Historically that has not been true. Even if they accomplish a formal liberation, it will not last for long. It will turn into something else because the class question will remain unasked.
PTM is facing the same dilemma. While they have the support of a very large number of radical, enlightened and progressive youth, the Pashtun bourgeoisie and nationalist leaders view them as a threat. In resolving the national question, PTM can either join hands with the old nationalists, or it can go to the working class to deepen its roots and to truly engage in a project of emancipation of the Pashtun population against imperialism and the military. For now though, they seem to be leaning towards the idea that the national question can resolve all other contradictions, which I do not agree with. If the principal contradiction is not kept in mind, it will keep changing form, and continue adding to the misery of the Pashtun populations.
Tayyaba: The overall point you are making is that the principal contradiction dictates the strategy, and therefore the tactics have to be aligned with the strategy, otherwise the movement can go in a direction that ultimately undermines its political goals.
Azeem: If you are clear about the principal contradiction, you can organize more around the subjective conditions rather than the objective conditions. Instead of constantly moving from one issue to the other, you can focus on organizing around your long-term strategy. Otherwise you will start ambulance-chasing, because there are so many other contradictions that momentarily become sharper.
Hadia: Do you have an example from your organizing work where you have had to confront this dilemma of the strategy not aligning with the tactics? What did you do in those situations? Have there been instances where you have had to leave a tactic for the sake of the broader strategy?
Azeem: After the 1996 takeover of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the MKP was part of the Pakistan National Conference (PNC) along with the Workers’ Party of Minto Sahib and Ghinwa Bhutto’s party. They saw the Taliban as the primary danger to the Left. They would say things like, “The Taliban are coming to Pakistan. They are 200 kilometres from Islamabad”. For many, the end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a new peaceful era of democracy, the market economy, development, and no imperialism. Many leftists/liberals saw religious fundamentalism as the primary enemy. After Pervez Musharraf’s coup in 1999, people within our groups supported the takeover, claiming that the military had changed its position and would now give space to the Left. They claimed it was a progressive power that wanted things like land reforms and development, even claiming that some generals had attended progressive study circles. 9/11 gave credence to those voices. The Left made a tactical decision to support the military against religious fundamentalism.
In such situations, one is compelled to decide whether to forego their focus on the principal contradiction in order to attend to other immediate contradictions, or to ensure that the principal contradiction is always dictating tactics on the ground. If the focus is always on addressing these other contradictions, it can take you very far from your revolutionary project. Those immediate contradictions have their own solutions within a liberal, reformist system, and are not anti-imperialist.
Tayyaba: Azeem, in light of that, what would you say to Ammar’s point of building a strategic alliance with the PTM because of the brutality they are facing, and as a historic responsibility of the Punjabi Left, even if there are elements within the PTM which do not fully align with an anti-imperialist vision?
Azeem: We all agree that we should support the PTM. However, while being in those alliances, how does one keep a distinct position? How is one clear about the long-term strategy, while continuing to engage at a tactical level? And most importantly, your cadre must not lose sight of your long-term goal and vision.
3. War on Terror
Arsalan: There was a lot of confusion within the left around Operation Zarb-e-Azb [the Pakistan military offensive ostensibly against militant groups in North Waziristan/FATA]. A vocal section of the Left supported the operation, and many were taken by surprise when the PTM later emerged from many of the same areas. Do you think the Left has been prejudiced in dealing with peripheral regions like FATA?
Aasim: I agree this was a source of confusion. In the Awami Workers’ Party (AWP), there was a huge struggle over this question. Those of us explicitly opposed to supporting any military operation were seen as a big problem. As you suggest, the Punjabi Left has historically tended towards being a bit insular and we have all inherited this deep sectarianism. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and even now in some segments of the Left, there is still an acute sense of sectarianism, such as who is a Trotskyite, a Maoist, a Stalinist, so on and so forth…
When I became involved in Left politics, I was exposed primarily to the pro-Russian left — and there was always this sense, which I felt was a bit too simplistic, that the ‘pro-Ayub’ [pro-China] Left, also called the ‘sarkari’ (state-allied) Left, had been given more leeway to work, unlike us, the leftists in the peripheries who were not even allowed to exist. So there is a history and element of truth in what you are saying.
Similarly, there were large segments of the Left that broke away from the National Awami Party (NAP) and joined the People’s Party (between 1967-69), who were very ethnocentric and insular. They had a compromised position on Bangladesh and even supported Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s military operation in Balochistan. So there is this underlying tension in Pakistan’s Left movement — I said previously that, for me, the class and national questions enjoy a symbiotic relationship, but unfortunately that’s not how they have always been seen in Left circles. Having said that, we also cannot equate class with nation and it’s important for there to be some ‘gradation’. In fact Ammar and I were discussing this the other day that for those of us organizing in Punjab, we cannot just do politics on the national question — we also have to have our own working-class base in the final analysis. So these are difficult, tricky questions.
Coming back to your point, I do not discount the fact that there may be some underlying racism. But not just racism, maybe an underlying feeling of superiority — that perhaps as Punjabis we are more well-read, samajhdaar [politically astute], or have greater familiarity with the Marxist canon, than those who are ‘only nationalists’. Coincidentally, our current party president, Yousuf Masti Khan, has spent his life among nationalist circles and still describes himself as a progressive nationalist — so I think there is a way to reconcile across this diverse spectrum, but there are also tensions. And these tensions were certainly reflected in the [military] operations. They were happening far away, and we might not like to admit it but mainstream Pakistan was always more likely to be drawn to government ideological tropes and media projections [about the tribal areas].
I was not surprised about PTM because, as I mentioned, we have greater interactions with Baloch, Pashtun, and Sindhi students coming into [Punjabi] cities to study. But some of the old guard, who may not have had that exposure, were a bit taken aback, and suddenly had to reconsider their previously unconditional support for the operation. I would not attribute that to some absolute underlying racist streak, while at the same time, one should acknowledge their blind spots and insularities.
Azeem: Yes, I think there were multiple levels of confusion within the Left — first, on the question of imperialism as we discussed, and then within that context, the question of Pashtun nationalism and the military operation. The operation was not just against the Taliban but against mostly Pashtun populations with huge violations against their human and constitutional rights. In a sense the national and imperialist question collided here.
I agree that we need to look back into historical patterns. As Aasim pointed out, yes Maoist groups were historically very much pro-Pakistan, due to the ties between the Ayub regime and China, whereas the pro-Moscow Left was very pro-India as it was anti-Pakistan state. At the same time, our analysis right now should be a ‘concrete analysis of concrete conditions’ — we should go back to theory and history but we must also reinvent. Continuity from the past is important but there is also a need of rupture, and here again I agree with Aasim.
While our positions have evolved over time particularly on imperialism, I think on the national question we are going in circles. On the one hand, the national question has been exhausted, on the other, it has gotten sharper. There seems to be an opening for class politics within it. It seems to be the right time to intervene in the national question from a class perspective.
4. Military
Tayyaba: In your organizing, how have you dealt with the question of the Pakistani military vis-à-vis its position within Pakistan’s ruling class, its subservience to US imperialism, and its own strategic and economic agendas?
“The Pakistani state has an ethnic logic – how it makes certain human beings more disposable compared to others is a very real part of the experience of ordinary people.”
Ammar: This is an important question and it links back to what comrade Aasim and comrade Azeem were saying. The Pakistani state has an ethnic logic – how it makes certain human beings more disposable compared to others is a very real part of the experience of ordinary people. This becomes clear in peripheral regions and in the case of women and minorities. This differentiation between people and the different intensities of violence they face is an integral part of how the state operates, and hence should be an integral part of our strategy to fight the state. Pakistan’s military is the primary vehicle in this racialized violence.
The question of unity is a difficult one because there is no such thing as one Punjabi left, one Pashtun position or one Baloch position. Just a few days ago (Aug 2022), the largest contingent of Imran Khan supporters was in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where he is extremely popular. So the periphery has its own contradictions, alongside the ones in the core and those across the federation. These have to be articulated together to form an alternative politics.
When we talk about the military and the state, we often ignore the global economic infrastructure within which our state is embedded. The critique of imperialism should not just stem from our position on Afghanistan or drones. Imran Khan has a very strong anti-American position on some of those issues, but he is the same guy who kneeled in front of the IMF, cut one of the worst deals and handed over the State Bank to an ex-IMF employee, Reza Baqir.
We have a very decadent elite that is not productive, even in the capitalist sense. Most of our money goes into land speculation overseen by the military, which has massive financial interests. Our unproductive economy is sustained by a massive import bill. We have a balance of payments crisis because of the IMF. The Pakistani state does not undertake reforms to fix this because it knows that it will keep getting loans as long as the military continues to play its historical role of a rentier.
The military rents its services out to the US in order to fight wars in the region. That has ensured constant supply of cash to sustain this very decadent, elite-driven economy. This relationship between violence, the military and imperialism is also intimately tied to the economic structure which is embedded within global capitalism. Pakistan is an outpost for America’s wars in the region, for controlling South Asia and for trying to manage the Muslim world. The US is now intensifying its role against China, which is also a part of the contradiction that is emerging between the Pakistani state and the US.
So one way that we can target both the military and imperialism is by questioning this IMF-sustained, unproductive, and decadent elite-driven economic infrastructure, which, according to the UNDP, includes a massive 17 billion dollars in annual privileges to the elites, a large portion of which goes to the military. Ordinary people become sacrificial lambs, and the situation is even more tense in the peripheries. Comrade Aasim has written about this in his recent book. Since this decadent elite cannot provide even a semblance of capitalist development, it simply goes on a rampage resembling primitive accumulation — taking away resources from the Baloch, occupying islands in Sindh, dispossessing farmers in Okara from their lands, and extracting minerals from FATA by creating monopolies and extorting rents.
The future is quite bleak. The military is not creating jobs but creating surplus populations. The natural logic of this system will be increased militarization, and the only thing we will be selling to the world is our support to some imperial power in its geo-strategic calculations in the region. That is a dystopian future against which we must fight. If we couch it in those terms, we can get support not just from mainland Pakistan, but also from the peripheries, because this system cannot give recognition or a place to either unless we have a very different economic orientation freed from the elites and their international backers.
Azeem: The Pakistan military is the seat of power of imperialism in the region, and it protects the interests of Pakistan’s capitalist and feudal elite. They may fight among each other, but ultimately the military protects them. This means our politics should be careful not to lend support to this institution through any excuse, whether that be curbing fundamentalism or anything else. It should be confined to the barracks, and its economic interests challenged. We should support any efforts to weaken this institution, from liberal sides or progressive sides, because — and this is important — this is the force that is protecting imperialism. We should not lose sight of this overall goal. Our struggle should be tied to our anti-imperialist politics and our ultimate project to build a socialist economy in Pakistan.
Aasim: This is an easy one for all of us to agree on, so I will just add some complexity to the problem. Is the military purely an entity that protects, defends, and projects the interest of the American empire, or does it also do a bit of mix and match? Ammar talked about Pakistan being a militarized rentier state. We should extend that a little bit further to understand CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) and the other patterns of the Pakistani state. America is still the dominant and primary entity as it still props up the military. While China has been an important part of Pakistan’s foreign policy matrix since the mid-60s, Chinese developmentalism is a new phase of the Sino-Pak relationship which started with the free trade arrangement in 2002, and in the form of CPEC in 2015. Of course, if Imran Khan was genuinely ‘anti-US’, he would have deepened CPEC, but he did the opposite. The PML-N were serious about CPEC and Imran Khan dragged his feet on it. Either way, the state as a whole, including the military, has cultivated and deepened economic ties with China.
This indicates that the military still sees its primary strategic, economic and corporate interests being served. It certainly does not see economic cooperation with China or Chinese influence as detrimental. In fact, in some areas — particularly the question of surveillance — it benefits from the cooperation. As far as statecraft goes, China is a more successful model of surveillance than any other country in the world. Large CPEC projects, like lining the fiber-optic cable and various ‘safe city projects’, represent a symbiotic relationship with the Pakistani military’s project of social control.
How will the military strike a balance between the US and China? Will it be able to maintain an adequate balancing act? Ammar has noted very rightly that a “New Cold War” on China seems to have a strategic consensus in the American establishment. How will America take to Pakistan continuing to warm up to China? We will have to wait and see. The Pakistani military clearly feels it can play both sides of this very complex strategic game.
But regardless, it certainly feels that its economic and corporate interests are being served by playing both sides. Because either way— whether it is the rapacious model of natural resource capture with the help of China, or the more financialized form of speculative capitalism christened and sealed in New York and Wall Street—the Pakistani military is trying to bridge these various forms of developmentalism in the global capitalist system for its own purposes.
Ammar rightfully pointed out that, for the Left the question is how to link these somewhat complex questions to organic struggles on the ground, especially struggles around dispossession. Whether it is Chinese developmentalism, or America’s imperial wars, the dominant effect of both is disposession. Not just now but also for future generations, when it comes to mass construction and mining of gold, coal, or copper. The long-term ecological impacts of the National Logistics Cell (NLC) and Frontier Workers Organization (FWO) complex, along with their logistics, construction and road-building empires remains underspecified, especially in mountainous highland areas. I think we have to be brave, and not just resign ourselves to choosing between the US and China. Our job is not to engage in baseless China-bashing either, but to understand our own concrete conditions.
The National Logistics Cell (NLC - Pakistan’s largest logistics company) and Frontier Works Organization (FWO - Pakistan’s largest construction company) sign an MOU to develop two sectors of the Defence Housing Authority (DHA - an elite housing society in all major cities of Pakistan) in Peshawar. All three organizations are owned and operated by the Pakistan army. Image: Tajarat
“I’m always looking for a reason to believe that Chinese hegemony on the world stage will be pro-people and anti-imperialist, but I have yet to find one.”
I’m always looking for a reason to believe that Chinese hegemony on the world stage will be pro-people and anti-imperialist, but I have yet to find one. This hope cannot be based on some abstract idea; it has to be reflected in what China brings to the table. If China ends up supporting authoritarianism, giving an affiliate to the military’s corporate empire, and by the way also offering a challenge to American hegemony, that is not sufficient for the Left to put all our chips in with China.
I also don’t think it’s time for us to call China a global imperialist power because that is going too far, but I do think it has imperialistic tendencies in Pakistan. While it’s not easy to build a political position around this, analytically it is something to acknowledge when thinking about how to articulate our positions.
Azeem: I agree with Aasim that the question of China is still unfolding. While we have a basic analysis of the nature of Chinese capital and some history of its investments in Latin America, Africa, and Pakistan, we do not have a history of Chinese expansionism. We should also be careful using the word “Cold War” for the the US and China rivalry. The Cold War was between two ideologies (with the socialist USSR which was supporting socialist movements around the world) whereas China today is a capitalist country. At most it can be called anti-[US]imperialist. It is too soon to call it a [global] imperialist state either.
My understanding is that a large contingent within the military has decided to side with US imperialism because of its historic continuity of colonialism. The links between the West and Pakistan run very deep and seeing this, China seems to have retreated from its promises to the Pakistani establishment. As Aasim said, once we are on the ground dealing with issues of dispossession, environmental degradation and landlessness, we will see China, the West, and our capitalist military — all of them — as enemies of the people.
5. Right-wing “Anti-imperialism”
Tayyaba: The right-wing has been successfully mobilizing support using the rhetoric of anti-Americanism. Why has the Left’s politics of anti-imperialism not been as resonant? Why has the Left been labelled “anti-national” or a “foreign agent”, when in fact it has such a long history of anti-imperialism?
Ammar: There is a difference between anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism and anti-imperialism. Anti-Westernism in Pakistan is a dangerously right-wing project, whose targets are women and minorities, and is tied to a hypermasculine notion of Pakistani nationalism. Nothing progressive can be redeemed from it. It takes the existing anxieties of people against the West and uses them with precision for a very anti-people, particularly anti-working class and authoritarian politics. This kind of xenophobia is happening across the world with Modi in India, Duterte in the Philippines, previously Bolsonaro in Brazil, etc.
Reifying the global North and the global South as fixed categories is dangerous, and Imran Khan is using these in a deadly manner. The current bout of hysterical nationalism in Pakistan is particularly dangerous for the people and left-activists because he openly calls the Supreme Court, parliament, the media, liberals and the Left the biggest obstacles to his agenda. His project seeks to annihilate institutional protections for people, which is why even while he is out of favour with the army chief, he still has so much support from different sections of the military. This is exactly the political project of the military over the past 40 years, and now they have street support behind it.
Our anti-imperialism cannot be limited to these cultural critiques. As comrade Azeem said, our anti-imperialism is different because it is premised on marginalized sections of the population — women, students, middle class — but led by the working class and the peasantry. That is the historical meaning of anti-imperialism: to fight for socialism, a redistribution of resources, human dignity and national rights.
When there were high-profile rape cases during his tenure, Imran Khan would attribute them to vulgarity and Western values infiltrating our culture, shifting the blame onto women. When Hazara Shias were killed, he called them blackmailers because they are a minority and hence dispensable, disposable people.
The question of national or federal sovereignty should not be tied to culture, but to economic sovereignty. People like Modi, Duterte and Imran Khan are willing to give up on all forms of economic sovereignty. We saw how Imran Khan pushed the legislation giving autonomy to the IMF through Parliament without any debate, but somehow he is considered anti-American.
So we have to reverse this — we have to stress that being anti-imperialist means fighting for economic sovereignty, creating a people’s government with a developmental plan for all, redistributing resources internally, and ending the constant wars in our peripheries. A radical, pro-poor economic agenda lead by a part of the the working class — this sets us apart from these xenophobic, cultural critiques of the West. This is the only way to demilitarize, create cohesion and frankly to face the challenges of climate catastrophe.
A rally called “Death to America Rally” organized by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) in 2018 against the US invasion of Afghanistan. Image: Arab News
Azeem: Imran Khan and his supporters are addressing the dissatisfaction people have with the cultural, military, and political aspects of imperialism. In terms of economics, while people recognize the issues with the IMF and the World Bank, Imran Khan’s regime was complicit in succumbing to these institutions.
When leftists take anti-US positions, they are accused by liberals and the Left of siding with the Right. After 9/11, we were dismissed as closet Jamaatis [supporters of Jamaat-e-Islami].
To be an anti-imperialist, one must necessarily subscribe to a pro-people politics. Both of these go hand in hand. The Imran Khan phenomenon is an upper-middle class one (and a diasporic one too) — appealing to engineers, educated professionals, those with money. Mainstream political parties have been unable to confront their propaganda. The only possible ideological confrontation can be from the Left: our truly anti-imperialist ideology which must be connected to a pro-people politics, the politics of the marginalized, and our history which shows that we are the actual custodians of anti-imperialist struggles.
In this context, organizing and educating our workers and cadre becomes extremely important. Since I joined the left in the 1990s, Left and anti-imperialist ideas have never been more popular than they are today. There is so much demand from students, professors and the educated youth, who want to learn about these things. This is an opportune time for the Left to organize around anti-imperialist ideas.
Aasim: I totally agree. Twenty years ago to be anti-imperialist was immediately to be branded a sympathizer of the Taliban, even on the Left, no matter how much you distinguished that position from a right-wing position. After the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, there is a lot of recognition that these people were correct. That the empire made a mess and now we are left to clean it up.
You asked why we are branded anti-national — well, because our state is a pro-imperialist state. We have always been anti-national and anti-state, by that definition. Even relatively affluent nationalists have been branded anti-state in Pakistan’s history. So that is not surprising. To turn the tide and to make what is a minoritarian position into a mainstream position, as both Azeem and Ammar have said, we have to mobilize within working people, which is not difficult to imagine, but is difficult to do.
In the short-term, we need to keep pushing our narrative, and actually have an anti-imperialist position, not just raise slogans like Imran Khan is doing. But in the long run, given that we have a youth bulge in Pakistan, our definitions of working people and class politics must also expand to address this demographic because it is going to be the majority of the population.
This is also the population that Imran Khan appeals to. Youth who are tech-savvy, young, diasporic, connected, and wanting something new. Deepening their understanding is our responsibility. They are not necessarily going to be drawn to anti-imperialist positions, but we have to devise a strategy to address that population, both in the position they occupy as working people in whatever form that takes, and as young people and students.
And lastly, anti-imperialism in Pakistan in practice demands challenging the military. There is just no way around it. One way or another, this is the pillar of imperialist power in the domestic context. That is not so difficult to imagine now as opposed to twenty years ago. Today, the mainstreaming of the anti-establishment discourse, however superficial, where people do talk about the military and its corporate empire, also owes itself to the few left voices who used to talk about this when nobody else would. Okara [protests against military farms] was the first movement of its kind. No one else talked about the military’s land grabs at the time. That is something we have done, and I agree with Azeem, we have greater potential now, and that potential is more likely to be realized if we do it together.
Azeem: Nobody can fight an anti-imperialist fight alone. It is always a united front strategy. I think we are almost there.
Tayyaba: Excellent, that is a great thought to end Part 1 on. We will continue our discussion in Part 2.
Updated on 12th Dec 2022 with a link to Taimur Rahman’s contestation of Syed Azeem’s claim that Rahman had supported the US invasion of Afghanistan.
This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. Stay tuned for Part 2.
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is an Associate Professor of political economy at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Pakistan. He is the author of The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons.
Ammar Ali Jan completed his doctoral studies in history from the University of Cambridge. He is a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party and the author of Rule By Fear: Eight Theses Authoritarianism in Pakistan. Ammar is also a Council member of the Progressive International and a Board member of Jamhor.
Syed Azeem is an Associate Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His research is on labour in Pakistan, and he is a member of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kisaan Party.