Bless the former PM for reminding us why we despise every sordid molecule of him. Few British leaders apart from Margaret Thatcher have been so completely loathed. He has left his party in a wretched, miserable state, panhandling for votes from people whom its has previously shown contempt for. He has driven the country further and faster to the right than most of his predecessors. He has participated in the international adventurism and vandalism of the most right-wing American administration since WWII, with no regrets. And he has come back with his memoirs, his shitty self-serving redacted diatribe about his kampf, to remind us just exactly what it is about him that is so emetic. To his war crimes, he adds crimes against language and taste.

It is appropriate, perhaps, that one of the monsters of our age should communicate his de profundis to us in a style befitting the morning television chat show. The matey populism, the chattiness, and the familiar cliche-riddled inarticulacy, is surely the fitting idiom for a thoroughly modern serial killer. In another age, a moralist, Whig and Gladstonian imperialist of Blair's class would have adopted a manner of expression displaying the fruits of a classical education. Literature would have supplied the dominant tropes of even his extemporary remarks. Today, advertising and public relations are the supreme genres. But there's something else - the discursive style suggests that Blair probably made use of a ghost writer who transcribed his waffling while the former premiere gurgled from the shower or expatiated from the back seat of a limo. Blair would deny this, and has complained that Robert Harris was a 'cheeky fuck' for suggesting that he was such a lightweight as to require a ghost-writer. A plausible alternative is that he used a team of monkeys with typewriters and some unfortunate editors had to piece together the smarmiest copy.

Blair's fat little compendium of pseudo-revelations, attacks on personal acquaintances and colleagues, self-justifying circumlocutions, political polemic, and narcissistic reflections, comes with its own self-destruct button. Comparing himself to the 'people's princess', he says: "We were both in our ways manipulative people, perceiving quickly the emotions of others and able instinctively to play with them." Elsewhere, he informs astonished readers that sometimes politicians must "conceal the full truth ... bend it and even distort it". This being the case, you might suspect that he is not always being honest with his readers, and that the impression he tries to give of opening up and being fully frank is as counterfeit as his 'intelligence' on Iraq. You might wonder what is the point of your parting with a portion of your spending power even for one of the thousands of half price copies that your local WH Smith will be shoving in your direction, if all that's going to happen is that Tony Blair lies to you. Again. When all he's ever done is lie to you, at taxpayers' expense. Will there come a time, you might wonder, when we will stop paying Tony Blair to lie to us?

You would also expect, from the foregoing, that Blair's testimonial should be a masterful display of button-pushing, noodzhing, heartstring-plucking and tear-jerking. At the end of which, the former Prime Minister should emerge as an heroic liberal reformer stoically facing down the forces of conservatism, triumphing against the odds, vindicated by history and the big man upstairs, though privately nurturing a wounded soul. So, roughly, it turns out. From his earliest political and legal education at the hands of Derry Irvine, the eminence grise whom he has described as a 'tyrannical genius', to the scuffles with Gordon Brown, whom he cheerfully patronises, Tony is almost always right, or on the right path. He's macho too. We hear all about COBRA sessions and 'ticking clock' scenarios in which, for example, he came close to blasting a passenger jet out of the skies. White-knuckle negotiating sessions with Ulster's natives are duly described with a certain amount of colonial panache. The tough guy, swaggering, iron-in-the-soul stuff that is de rigeur for former statesmen of his ilk, is all there. But so is the love-me-tender vulnerability. He says he hit the bottle to manage the stress of his job. Boo hoo. Millions of people do that all the time - it's called alcoholism. Like the walrus, he says he cried for his victims in Iraq, before mercilessly consuming every one. He admits to a few 'small' errors here and there, of course. He is mortal after all, like Jesus or, his other role model, Diana.

Even when confessing to errors, though, what is most eminently on display is Blair's cynicism. When he cheerfully admits to lying through his teeth, manipulating everyone around him, he is sure to let us know of the effect this had on policymaking. On the freedom of information act, he tells us that it was an 'imbecilic' mistake because of the way journalists used it to ask questions about what the government was doing. Oh well, never mind our civil rights, Tony, if it inconveniences you in any way. On the fox-hunting business, he says he deliberately sabotaged his own legislation to let some forms of hunting continue, to the ire of Labour colleagues. At the end of these triangulations, he complains that he "felt like the damn fox". Poor thing. Hunted by mad dogs and mounted forces of conservatism, chased through the thickets of political intrigue, always on the brink of capture - but miraculously...

The ex-PM's Tory instincts are also prominent, as he again attempts to whip his party, the public and the world into shape. Having given his support to the coalition's austerity programme, which even the right-wing of the Labour Party is now shying away from, he orders Labour not to 'drift to the Left', as if the big problem for Labour is that it might start representing some of the millions of working class voters that it lost under Blair's watch. And he's pleading with 'the world' not to rule out the possibility of war with Iran. He hasn't had his fill of blood crimes yet. David Cameron, who has falsely alleged that Iran has nuclear weapons, would probably agree. Blair is not only a logical ally of this sham of a government, but is on its right-wing. To Clegg's right on war, to Cameron's right on identity cards, civil liberties and even immigration, Blair has never had any business as part of this country's organised labour movement. That he was ever its leader is a shame and a disgrace. Labour's members, supporters and affiliates should look at his memoirs, look at the way he's conducting himself in the press, preening himself, spouting his ridiculously reactionary opinions as if he hasn't been comprehensively discredited, and say to themselves: "never again".

Protest at his book-signing at Waterstones Piccadilly, next Wednesday, 8th September.

Research confirms the patently frigging obvious, namely that insurgent attacks in Afghanistan are motivated by NATO violence:

The authors of the report by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research say they analysed 15 months of data on military clashes and incidents totalling more than 4,000 civilian deaths in a number of Afghan regions in the period ending on 1 April.

They say that in areas where two civilians were killed or injured by Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), there were on average an extra six violent incidents between insurgents and US-led troops in the following six weeks.

The report concludes that civilian deaths frequently motivate villagers to join the ranks of insurgents.

"In Afghanistan, when Isaf units kill civilians, this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks."

"Local exposure to violence from Isaf appears to be the primary driver of this effect."

This is not an anti-occupation study. Rather, it supports McChrystal's counterinsurgency (COIN) policy of restraining military actions in order not to provoke resistance. (For background on this, see here.) This policy is intended to secure loyalty among the natives and enable the occupiers to build a client state structure, but its logic is to prepare the way for a plausible exit, one in which the US doesn't look like it just had its ass handed to it. The prevailing opinion in the military establishment seems to be that COIN didn't work. The strategy of outright high-octane aggression didn't pacify the insurgency either, however, and it's been guzzling revenue for few discernible rewards at a time when the Pentagon is under increasing pressure to reduce its expenditure - the empire is in no danger of going broke immediately, but its resources are seriously stretched. So Obama is sticking with COIN for the time being, while explicitly endorsing negotiations with segments of the Taliban. This is hitched to an ostensible initial withdrawal date of July 2011. There can, of course, be policy reversals. But the American economy is in a bad way, and the empire's global power is deteriorating. The more strategically-minded elements in the ruling class may consider it advisable to adapt to this situation rather than continue with the adventurist policies of Obama's predecessors.

Riaz Ahmed speaks on the 'war on terror' in Pakistan.

War and its pseudo-histories
Our understanding of the war in Pakistan is bracketed by implicit, unspoken exclusions. The glimpses we get are like occasional narrow slits in an otherwise solid screen. We are encouraged to draw our attention to, for example, suicide attacks on government officials in Peshawar. But we otherwise have little context with which to interpret such bloody doings, apart from some general catch-all explanations about the medievalism and bloodlust of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This narrowness of focus, instead of contextualising such attacks in the war launched by the Pakistani military, at the behest of the US, on the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), rather provides a pretext and pseudo-explanation for that war. A multi-faceted conflict is reduced to the simple dichotomy of 'extremists' and 'moderates'.

To the extent that there is context in the Anglophone press, it tends to come from the perspective of counterinsurgency, and reduces the population of the NWFP to a xenophobic, insular, ethnonationalist rump, and reduces the insurgency to the issue of nationalism. In Pakistan itself, this analysis has manifested itself as deep-seated bigotry toward the Pashtuns, as Riaz Ahmed recently wrote. In fact, the insurgency is more complex, transcending Pashtun nationalism in the name of pragmatic alliances and an Islamist ideology that is not specific to any ethnicity. Its primary motivation in this war is opposing the US expansion of the 'war on terror' into Pakistan and the decision of the Pakistani military to join Washington in attacking pro-Taliban forces in these areas. But its relationship with the state is by no means one-dimensional, as the Pakistani military has previously relied on the TTP to support Pakistani interests in Afghanistan, which is why some in the Pakistani ruling class are unhappy with the strategy of aligning with the Washington axis.

Pakistan's entanglement in this war has continued after the majority of the population rejected Washington's candidate, Musharraff, in the 2008 elections - Washington's military and economic clout, ensured that there would be no deviation from the script. If the military clout is expressed in the ability of the US to engage in attacks in Pakistani territory without seeking prior approval, the economic leverage has been expressed over billions of dollars in aid/bribes, and regular loans from eg the World Bank to keep the Pakistani treasury ticking over and assist with counterinsurgency and rebuilding in 'conflict' zones. Divisions in the Pakistani ruling class are matched by concerns about the long-term cohesiveness and territorial integrity of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Class struggles and civil society movements intersect with the war in telling ways, as when the lawyers' movement was launched in response to the government's sacking of the chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, for the crime of revealing state complicity in the 'disappearing' of citizens to be rendered to the CIA for 'interrogation'. Thus, the war raises deeper questions about the direction of Pakistani society, and the relationship between imperialism and postcolonial statehood in the subcontinent, than are open for discussion in the press.

Postcolonial statehood, and the alliance with Washington
The creation of Pakistan as a Muslim state was driven by numerous processes. Among these were growing divergences of interest between the Indian National Congress and Indian Muslims. The former's tendency to sequester Indian nationhood on behalf of the Hindu bourgeoisie, and the failings of non-violent strategies which resulted in much unnecessary death and suffering, led to millions of Indian Muslims aligning with the Muslim League and its campaign for a separate Muslim state. Support for the state of Pakistan was not uniform. The Pushtun nationalists in the north-west wanted to create unity with India. When that was not possible, they fought for independence. The Red Shirts, and their celebrated leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, were militarily crushed. But there, as in Balochistan, resistance to the Pakistani state project has fuelled an ongoing 'national question' that has flared up in repeated struggles. The state that issued was basically run by the country's landowners, businessmen, officers and civil servants, all of whom had come to the fore under colonial rule. The administrators were those who had been incubated and developed by the British empire, and the ruling class oriented toward Washington with the Baghdad Pact (now SEATO) in 1954. Institutions of formally representative government initially provided a facade of popular rule, but they didn't survive for more than a decade. By 1958, the army took power and the country was ruled by the Sandhurst graduate Ayub Khan and his clan.

Attempting to express popular interests were a variety of leftist parties. The Communist Party (CPP) had aligned itself with the bourgeosie in the Muslim League, but were driven out. It then attempted to go for a coup in alliance with another section of the bourgeosie, unsuccessfully, and was banned in 1951. Some of its exiles joined the National Awami Party (NAP), a coalition of progressive liberals, radical nationalists and socialists, rooted mainly in the peasantry. Its elderly leader, Maulana Bhashani, was rooted particularly in the East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) peasants movement, and was he and the party were driven to the left by the emergence of a militant labour movement in the 1950s. It was in response to this labour movement, emerging from Lahore but spreading across the country, that the military took control in 1958 and imposed martial law. A more entrenched ruling class with a robust civil society underpinning its rule would not have been compelled to resort to military rule. But the Pakistani ruling class has repeatedly had to resort to military dictatorship to contain challenges to its control. The NAP, for its part, muted its critique of Ayub Khan through much of the Sixties because of the latter's common pact with the People's Republic of China against India, which for some made him an 'anti-imperialist'.

From revolution to dictatorship
Out of the great revolutionary upsurge in 1967-68 came a new formation, the Pakistan People's Party. The conditions for the revolutionary movement to emerge had been provided by the intensified rates of exploitation in the society as capitalist social relations spread, and the concentration of society's resources - the banks, the insurance companies, industrial capital - in the top 22 families. Ayub himself became extraordinarily wealthy, of course, while the long-term interpenetration of military and capitalist elites has led to a situation today in which the Pakistani military is estimated to have a private capitalist empire worth £10bn. The labour movement showed its first signs of breaking out of the military straitjacket in the railway strikes of 1966. Then in 1967, a students movement arose. The established left parties showed no sign of understanding the significance of this, believing that it would easily be contained by the military dictatorship. But it was later joined by lower middle class layers and peasants. Only when workers in some urban centres responded to a call for a general strike from student leaders with an all-out stoppage did the ruling class, the established left, and the student movement itself begin to see what was being awoken. The labour movements arose amid revolutionary turmoil, as did a national independence movement in East Pakistan, which had long been exploited by the western ruling class. These combined forces were not sufficient to overthrow the rulers of Pakistan, but they did compel Ayub to declare that he would step back and allow the addled General Yahya Khan to take over in 1969. Yahya promised elections within a year.

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP), a radical socialist organisation led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, won in the west. In the east, the Awami League, of which Maulana Bahsani was a co-founder, stormed to victory. But the new PPP government was not in a mood to negotiate a settlement with the Awami League and, by boycotting the new assembly set up in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, gave the military space to plan an assault. The occupation, when it came, was supported by Bhutto's government, even as it degenerated into outright genocidal slaughter. There was an orchestrated massacre of left-wing activists and intellectuals, with the connivance of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Pakistani state's favourite Islamist party whose assistance in the slaughter helped them overcome their catastrophic loss in the 1970 elections. The Bhutto government, having aligned itself with the slaughter in what is now Bangladesh, largely failed to deliver on its radical social democratic programme, for example shelving the rural reform package to placate landowners. Instead, it cracked down on its left-wing opponents, banning the NAP in 1975 (it was reinvented in 1986, out of four pro-Soviet parties, as the Awami National Party), suppressing Balochistan provincial autonomy in the same year (resulting in an insurgency that the Pakistani army would crush with customary brutality) and attempted to outflank the religious right by adopting their policies. It was Bhutto who turned Pakistan into a nuclear state, and it was he who promoted his ultimate nemesis General Zia ul-Haq to army chief of staff.

This, and the PPP's manipulation of the 1977 elections, gave the military a chance to strike against the civilian government and introduce one of the deadliest phases in Pakistani politics. Zia had been most notable for his role in helping the Jordanian monarchy to crush increasingly militant Palestinian refugees in 'Black September', a horrendous period in which thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered. He was an outright reactionary, and when the civil unrest provoked by the PPP's ballot-rigging became impossible for the government to contain, he stepped into and imposed martial law. Bhutto was hanged. His crime as far as the ruling class was concerned had nothing to do with ballot-rigging, since they didn't care for democracy, but rather the mild reforms he introduced, which were duly reversed. Zia privatized and de-regulated industry, and oversaw the "Islamization" (sic) of the Pakistani polity, in an attempt to crush the Left and the trade unions. He re-founded the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) as a conservative bloc, the basis of today's PML-N (Nawaz Sharif's faction) and PML-Q (the other factions). Zia's willingness to cooperate with Carter's intervention in Afghanistan consolidated Islamabad's position as a key link in Washington's chain of pliable dictatorships, and Carter rewarded him by reversing a ban on nuclear fuels imposed two years earlier, allowing Zia to fortify the nuclear weapons programme initiated by Bhutto. (This ban was re-imposed after Pakistan tested a nuclear weapon in 1978, only to be lifted in time for the 'war on terror'). It was in this period that the Pakistani state began to incubate reactionary Islamist movements, among them the 'Talibs' who would go on to take over Afghanistan after the defeat of Soviet Union, and who would becomes allies of the Pakistani military in the NWFP and FATA.

The north-west remade by blood and iron
The combination of martial law and participation in the proxy war with Russia also meant that local martial governors had a great deal of authority and clout under the dictatorship. Lt Gen Fazle Haq could saturate the NWFP with heroin and weapons, Gen Rahimudden Khan could drench Balochistan in blood as he annihilated the insurgency, and Nawaz Sharif used his governorship of Punjab to build his political career as a conservative, pro-privatization administrator. Political power was increasingly parcellised, and religious, nationalist and ethnic ideologies used to divide people, with politicians playing one group off against the other. Both Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, who ran civilian administrations after Zia's death, learned how to play these games. It formed an important part of the state's strategizing. When Bhutto and Sharif supported the Taliban in Afghanistan, this was in part a way of consolidating support among some layers of Pashtuns, as well as a foreign policy interest in itself, and an assured way to open up trade routes through the Khyber Pass to central Asia. The Taliban could not have taken power without the assistance of Pakistan, just as its decision to withdraw rapidly in 2001 came at the behest of the Pakistani military leadership. In a similar way, both Sharif and Bhutto used the issue of Kashmir to mobilise local support, recruiting Islamist volunteers to fight India, thereby pursuing a domestic agenda and a foreign policy objective at the same time. As rulers used ethnoreligious divisions and clientelist politics to win support and cultivated armed gangs to fight important battles for them, Pakistan was flooded with weapons and fights between different gangs would periodically shut down parts of big cities like Karachi. The current demonisation of Pashtuns is of a piece with this method of divide-and-rule.

The FATA and NWFP in particular were dramatically transformed by the Afghan wars, the heroin traffick that followed raising the number of addicts in Pakistan from hundreds to millions, the arms trade, and the vast refugee flows that left millions of Pashtuns. Elements in the Pakistani military were able to make a fortune as narco-capitalists and arms dealers in this period, their money laundered by the notorious BCCI, and the ready use of reactionary militias to terrorise opponents was always handy for any ruling class. The origins of the present day TTP, and various allied groups, are in the madrasas and camps set up in the provinces to train and house international jihadis, with US, Saudi and Pakistani funding and equipment. The current corruption and weakness of law enforcement has roots in this period, as does the complete paucity of healthcare and education. The fact that the CIA pretty well turned the provinces into a theme park for warlords, gun-runners and drug-traffickers undermined any prospect for development of a sustainable infrastructure. Today, the FATA and NWFP are the poorest provinces in Pakistan, with local administrators almost wholly dependent on federal funding due to the absence of a local tax base. The 'war on terror' isn't doing either province any favours.

The collapse of the Left, the Taliban and the 'war on terror'
Zia's best efforts did not destroy the Left. For example, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, a coalition uniting the PPP with others on the Left, was launched to combat Zia's dictatorship, and the PPP experienced some rejuvenation as a result. What hammered the Left was its support for the USSR. The pro-Moscow parties failed to relate to the nationalist struggle in Balochistan in part because Moscow had, in its Afghanistan venture, opposed the traditional Leninist line on national liberation (not for the first time). The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was a blow to those who opposed the 'Mujahideen' and saw Russia as the progressive force in the region. The collapse of the USSR was devastating. Most of the Stalinist groups moved to the right, and much of the Left disintegrated. The communist parties shrank to tiny groupuscules. The formerly leftist Awami National Party, which is strongly rooted in NWFP, has become a secular Pushtun nationalist party. The PPP is run by millionaires and property-owners. President Zardari has a personal fortune of almost $2bn. The vacation of socialism from the political scene left a vacuum, which the bourgeois parties have struggled to fill - their naked corruption and clientelism allowed the return of the military in 1999, to only muted protest at first.

Despite the state's patronising of Islamist parties and militias, a tradition continued by Musharraf, confessional politics has rarely enjoyed much popular support in Pakistan. Only in limited, localised circumstances have Islamists been able to gain any measure of mass support. The Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), also based in the NWFP, was able to channel petit-bourgeois hostility to government corruption during the real estate boom of the 1990s, and gain some support because of that. But since 2001, it has been mainly embroiled in combatting NATO forces in Afghanistan. The 2002 elections were won by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in NWFP, a reformist Islamist grouping standing against the government's corruption and promising to end nepotism and bring about a fairer justice system. In those stated goals, they failed by a spectacular margin, leading to their defeat by secular forces, as we shall see. What the MMA did accomplish was 'Islamization' of the education system, a ban on music in public transport, and prevented women from being treated by male doctors - in a vicinity with a dearth of trained healthcare professionals. As I say, secular forces largely benefited from the MMA's failures, but at the same time the escalation of Pakistan's war in FATA and NWFP between 2007 and 2009 led to the TTP showing its first signs of developing some support among masses of the population, particularly in the Swat valley where atrocities by Pakistani troops have included the levelling of villages and the destruction of schools and medical facilities, producing millions of refugees.

The Pakistani Taliban
The TTP started to coagulate as a de facto formation in around 2002, though it was only formally consolidated in December 2007 following a shura of 40 Taliban leaders. It is in many ways a deeply unpleasant, cruel and tyrannical grouping, reflecting both its reactionary social doctrines and its CIA/ISI training. Some of the Taliban membership in the early 2000s was drawn from among veterans of Afghanistan, who fled on orders from the Pakistani military. Throughout this period, they were being held in reserve for a future battle to conserve Pakistani interests in Afghanistan. It would seem that the decision to go after the TTP leadership when it was formed, was taken under heavy US pressure. The bounty on TTP leader Baitulla Mehsud's head is offered mainly by the US, with Pakistan reluctantly contributing $600k of the $5.6m bounty. The Taliban, in the period between 2002 and the escalation of war in NWFP in 2007, developed de facto institutions of government in some areas. Since the formation of the TTP, the party has promulgated some grisly discipline. To deter informers, for example, they have broadcast footage of men having their throats cut. In one brutal act, which backfired dramatically, the TTP broadcast the flogging of a Swati woman, and were forced by public outrage to dissociate themselves from it. Their allies have included the TNSM, which formed a brutal parallel government in the Swat valley in 2007. Musharraf and the CIA have claimed that the TNSM bore primary responsibility for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, though this is hardly believed by anyone in the PPP since Bhutto knew herself to be the target of potential assassination by leading elements in the state and military intelligence.

Such groups, though initially dependent on ties to the Pakistani state - which have not been completely broken - have also shown the ability to thrive in war. Meanwhile, the military has demonstrated that it can shift between rival gangs of Islamists, playing one group off against the other. It us currently using the Kashmir-based Lashkar e-Toiba group, supposedly banned in 2002, to attack the TTP in NWFP. According to Nasreen Ghufran, based at the University of Peshawar, part of the problem for the government was that in the period from 2001 to 2007, the Taliban had been using its relationship with the military to create a space for itself, gradually converting passive into active support among a layer of the population in FATA and NWFP. A succession of peace deals bartered by the Pakistani military, intended to gain the agreement of Taliban and tribal leaders not to give sanctuary to 'foreign' militants, failed. It failed partly because the term 'foreign' is inapplicable for those who don't recognise the Durand Line, and partly because the basis of support for the Taliban was their use of anti-imperialist rhetoric, which they would undermine by appearing to be party to the 'war on terror'.

Pakistan's reluctant - but once launched, brutal - war against the TTP and its support base has resulted in a dramatic escalation in the activities of the TTP and sympathetic groups. The Pakistani military's massacres, and the murderous drone assaults that Obama has escalated, threw people into the arms of the Taliban and other Islamist groups that are prepared to fight NATO and the military. The TTP have demonstrated their ability to strike in unpredictable ways, with devastating results. Between 2005 and 2008, the rate of insurgent attacks in Pakistan increased by 746%. Thousands were killed and injured as a result, as officials in the government, police and military headquarters. Neither a change in the national government, nor in the local administration has restrained this trend. In the February 2008 provincial elections, a 'progressive' coalition of the Pakistan People's Party and the Awami National Party (ANP) took control of NWFP, defeating the reformist Islamist grouping who had run the region until then.

If these parties had a solution to the grievances of local populations, they would have retained support. Instead the war continued, and the Taliban sought to position themselves as the most committed anti-US force in the province. There followed a sharp rise in attacks on local government officials, particularly in the provincial capital, Peshawar. Whatever people thought of the perpetrators, the targets didn't gain much sympathy. Unable to offer an alternative, the ANP sought to cut deals with the Islamists, and lost much of the support they had previously gained. The TTP have also lost support since mid-2009, however, due to their harsh disciplinary practises and the gruelling civilian toll of their insurgency. Gallup polls estimated that they had the sympathy of about 11% of people in NWFP by June 2009, and that it had fallen to 1%. It's possible that such polls underestimate Taliban support, as they have been known to do in Afghanistan, but the decline is likely to be real.

The state's attempt to overcome its unpopularity by using American dollars to bring food and development projects into these provinces, on the other hand, is hardly likely to work for as long as the military is butchering people. And for all that the Pakistani military has complied with the US, and remains dependent on American aid, there are strains in the alliance, as expressed in America's nuclear agreement with India, an attempt to outflank China. Pakistan can participate in the 'war on terror' on its own doorstep, but did not send a single soldier to Iraq. The more the US breaches Pakistani sovereignty, and the less the war in Afghanistan looks like succeeding, the more difficult and tenuous the alliance becomes. The middle ranking officers in the Pakistani military are already, Tariq Ali reports, deeply unhappy with the war they are being forced to prosecute, and such divisions are likely to come to the fore.

Conclusion
Of course, the Islamists don't have the answer to US imperialism, any more than they have an alternative to the corrupt state and brutally exploitative forms of accumulation that persist in Pakistan. But the weakened Left has often failed to offer anything in opposition, other than support for secular fractions of the ruling class and military. Just as sections of the Left fell behind Musharraf throughout the 2000s, many on the Left have supported the 'war on terror', and particularly the counterinsurgency in FATA and NWFP. Having collapsed into despondency and inward-looking sectarianism after the fall of the USSR, and having little faith in the potential strength of the organised labour movements, they see Pakistan's secular rulers as the last bulwark against the Islamists. Sadly, support for military rule and conquest is not new for sections of the Pakistani left (and even less happily, such stances are hardly unique to the left in Pakistan). The urban working class is, for sure, a minority in Pakistan, and anti-union laws and corrupt trade union officials have helped keep a lid on struggles. But it hasn't always worked, as Geoff Brown points out, struggles continued throughout the 1990s as the Left fell apart, and:

[m]ore recently, the fisherfolk in Sindh have been able to force the paramilitary Rangers to end their occupation of fishing areas near the border. The Serena hotel workers in Quetta have successfully fought victimisation and won official recognition. The power loom workers in Faisalabad, based mainly in medium and small workplaces, successfully organised a major strike over pay in 2005. Shortly before this the telecom workers occupied their workplaces against privatisation. It took the mobilisation ot hundreds ot soldiers, surrounding key exchanges, and the mass arrests of strike leaders to defeat them. The opposition ot the Karachi electricity supply workers was a major cause ot the collapse ot the deal privatising it in 2004. Thousands of farmers in Okara, near Lahore, have resisted attempts by the army to take control of their land for five years now. At an everyday level, there are countless protests over water shortages, housing and corruption.

Similarly, Sartaj Khan of the International Socialists of Pakistan, argues that the energy tarrif increases, price rises and lay offs that have come with the global recession are not being met without resistance. These are the constituencies that a left worth its name has to look to. These, as Geoff Brown points out, have been looking outward to the global antiwar and anticapitalist movements. In Balochistan, where the state is battling with local movements over the control of natural resources, a new radical left is emerging. Karachi provided a venue for the World Social Forum in 2006, and there are layers of activists looking beyond the dynastic, corrupt, bourgeois politics of the PPP. The old left that sees the Islamists as a greater enemy than the military, and thus aligns itself with US imperialism and the vicious Pakistani ruling class - the same forces that have hammered the Left and the working class for decades - has no answers for such people. A defeat for NATO in Afghanistan would put a stop this war, undermine support for the Islamists, weaken the Pakistani military, and give people a breathing space to organise. Pakistan's entanglement in such imperialist adventures has done nothing but strengthen the forces of reaction inside the country.

This is a 'positive' news story about Muslims in the way that a certain kind of supremacist ideology sometimes condescends to its victims. It is also, indirectly, yet another story that venerates 'the troops', corroborating the ersatz charisma of people who are basically bureaucrats with weapons.

We have a tendency to speak of the troops either as brave volunteers or as tragic conscripts. In fact, they are more like mercenary traffic wardens with a license to kill, in that their job is to resolve administrative and territorial problems with the skilled application of violence - in this case, the problem is how to control insubordinate population groups and bring Afghanistan fully under the sovereign authority of NATO and its patrimonial client-state. The sick martial fetishism and the rituals that eulogise such evil banality, lathering on about 'sacrifice' and 'courage' and other soap-on-a-rope virtues, is intended to obscure this mundane reality. One does not evoke fascism lightly, but readers of Enzo Traverso's book on The Origins of Nazi Violence will be aware of the history of how violence under capitalism was bureaucratised and de-personalised, and part of the story of imperial nationalism is the attempt to re-invest such everyday killing with a sort of personality.

The issue of 'the troops' has, of course, long been used as a stick with which to beat Muslims, a disciplinary tool. If you don't support the troops, and if you're at all vocal about this, the media has already signalled that it is ready to treat this as treasonous conduct - 'extremist', 'fanatic', etc. So when you get a story that shows Muslims participating in rituals lionising the troops, as if it's inherently newsworthy, the temptation might be to exhale with relief. At last, there's a story that doesn't completely and outrageously vilify Muslims. At last, there's a news item that talks about Muslims which doesn't terrorise people, driving them round the twist with impotent fury about mad mullahs on benefits, or bombers who can't be deported, etc. The BBC has fulfilled its public service remit by balancing out the hysterical racist trash with an understated human interest story. But it's more problematic than that. Such news items actually reinforce the racist hysteria by playing the game of 'good Muslim, bad Muslim'. It lays out the kind of behaviour that is required of Muslims in order that they might not be subject to ritual denunciation and interrogation. It is in essence no different from the kind of antisemitic ideology that counterposed the good 'National Jew' from the malevolent 'International Jew'. The response it nakedly invites us "they're not all bad, then", which is a racist response.

In my racism article, I mentioned polls that detected higher 'identification' with Britain than among the population as a whole. Most people don't really give a damn about patriotism. It has little relevance to their lives, doesn't explain anything, doesn't get them any extra income or Nectar card points, and doesn't improve their sense 0f well-being. During the World Cup, a minority start to indulge a certain amount of flag-waving, which an even smaller minority with a nationalist agenda try to hijack, salivating about the "passion and pride" on display - attributes that certainly become more evident, if less obviously laudible, the more Tetley's bitter is consumed. But otherwise it's a minority of bullies and bigots who actually take nationalism at all seriously.

So when a majority of Muslims express identification with the UK, you know there's something up. And it's very obvious what this is. Newspapers in this country have long used push polls among Muslims to provoke certain kinds of reply that could be used to monger hate and fear. Politicians, and the scum British press, are constantly hectoring Muslims about their alleged failure to fit in, to buy into "British values" and so on. So when some polling agency comes asking stupid questions, the right answer is whatever will subvert these attempts at demonisation. Of course, Muslims shouldn't have to feel any more patriotic than I do in order to have the right to go about their business unmolested, but that's not how it works here. Obviously another aspect of the BBC's warm-hearted little story is that while reinforcing the good Muslim-bad Muslim dichotomy, and the racist ideology underpinning it, it also whitewashes the armed forces - far from being a racist mercenary force, it is a modern, multicultural, democratic army that is out to work alongside the ordinary decent people of Afghanistan and protect them from the bad Muslims who are causing such trouble. Which merely adds to the hypocritical perversity of such ostensible auntie-racism.

In entirely unrelated news, the results from last week's poll on patriotism are as follows: 44.5% of 596 readers say that patriotism can best be defined as "petty, property-obsessed egoism masquerading as social solidarity". In a distant second, 20.3% say it is "a free gift with every four pack of Carlsberg". As I explained last week though, 'the markets' would determine the result whoever you voted for. So what we're going to do is form a coalition between the remaining three answers, who have 34.2% between them, and with the first-past-the-post system they form an outright majority. Now, unfortunately the exigencies of forming a stable, governing definition in these uncertain times means that they may have to abandon some of their promises, so what's going to happen is that the definition of patriotism will now be: "A vital means of ensuring integration and civic cohesion." Don't blame anyone but yourselves. You, the public, failed to give a clear answer, and we had to sort out the mess you left us with. True story.

One thing that Anjem Choudhury and his acolytes are absolutely right about is that Anglian soldiers are going to rot in hell. At least, they'll be rotting in Wootton Basset under Union Jack napkins while the RAF stages its provocative marches through the beleaguered market town, which is just as bad.

I have been observing a strange, coded, stilted kind of uneasy chattering emerge in the media, the kind that is usually filed under 'comment' or 'debate'. The general thrust of this chatter is that 'extremists'* known as 'Islam4UK' are intent on marching through Wootton Bassett, a small town in Swindon near RAF Lyneham. This is also where deceased British soldiers are paraded when they are brought back from Afghanistan, en route to the coroners. (Nothing good ever happens in Swindon.) The chatterers believe that this is no coincidence, and that this group 'Islam4UK' means to denigrate the sacrifices made by these soldiers - let us leave aside whether their sacrifice is at all worth extolling (it isn't). Depending on their specific concern, these commentators either want us to revile 'Islam4UK' or ignore them. My sympathies are with the latter, since this group is eminently ignorable. They pose a threat to no one, and are probably riddled with MI5 moles. In fact, I'm of the decided opinion that there's more mole than molehill in this organisation. The trouble is that the latter position often comes with hand-wringing about defending 'real' or 'moderate' Islam from association with these headbangers. I really don't blame them for this - it is the racism of the media and a segment of the public that compels them to undertake such prophylactic operations. But it is still far too defensive: Muslims don't have anything to answer for as a group, and aren't responsible for 'Islam4UK' any more than all white people are responsible for Operation Enduring Freedom, Guantanamo, Bagram, extraordinary rendition, fascist marches, arson attacks on mosques, genocide, colonialism, slavery, Nazism, etc etc.

But already a Facebook-based campaign aimed at opposing the march has generated considerable media heat, and has garnered over 600,000 members. The group insists that it is not anti-Muslim, has no racial agenda, and is not interested in promoting any one political group. I think for some of the organisers this may be true. Predictably, however, it emerges that among those running the group is a BNP activist named Dennis Raines. What is more, despite being apprised of this, the organiser of the site is standing by Mr Raines. So, that suggests a very interesting approach to what the group refers to as 'extremism'. Fascists and racists are, far from being extremists, appropriate allies in the struggle against a group that would have difficulty packing out a telephone box. I would like to think that this is just an anecdote, just an incidental fact about the way in which one campaign emerged and has developed. But it happens that whenever there is an attempt to generate a controversy about the troops, Islam and 'extremism', the far right and the racist filth are almost invariably involved. Further, one has to wonder about the sense of perspective among such a large number of people that they are apparently moved to affront by a proposed hoe-down involving refugees from the banned al-Muhajiroun outfit. I realise they're a noisome bunch - I hear that Anjem Choudhury is opposed to Christmas forgodsake. Still, they remain peripheral. And I'm quite sure that among those mortally offended by Choudhury's antics are quite a few who have nothing but bromides about 'free speech' to offer when genuinely menacing and violent groups like EDL engage in marches against local mosques etc.

Isn't it about time these people grew up, and stopped being so easily gulled? Their wealth is being consumed in the fires of an almighty recession, their mortgages aren't worth jack any more, their economic security is being incinerated, they can't borrow any more and even if they could they could never expect to pay it back, if they have a job they can't be sure they'll still have one in a month's time, employers are taking the opportunity to slash wages and extend working hours, their retirement age is being deferred in some cases beyond the point at which they can expect to croak, their public services are about to face a savage bout of cuts, the whole basis of their livelihood until this point has been based on ideological fiction... and they're allowing themselves to be obsessed by these objects of petty resentment. If you're one of these people, my advice is to stop hyperventilating, get some exercise, relax, and concern yourself with a few things that actually matter.

*Just so that we're clear on useage, 'extremism' isn't a meaningful political category. What is extreme is whatever offends me, whatever defies my common sense, whatever my tastes and/or narrow-mindedness prevents me from understanding. As the above indicates, the discourse of extremity smuggles in normative assumptions in a language that is supposedly neutral and technocratic - it's one reason why governments are apt to frame legislation in such terms, as it allows them maximum flexibility in pursuing heretics. The correct political term for people like 'Islam4UK' is 'fucknuggets'.

On the evening of 27 December 1979, Hafizullah Amin was incapacitated in his presidential palace. He had been poisoned earlier in the day by KGB agents, while 5,000 Russian soldiers who had been arriving at Kabul international airport over the previous three days made their way to the palace. They took over the television stations, the radio stations, and the police force of the Interior Ministry. Russian military advisers had, in a repeat of a tactic used in the invasion of Czechoslavakia, instructed Afghan soldiers loyal to Amin to turn in their live ammunition and use blank rounds in the days before the invasion - it was sold as a 'training' operation.

The communication lines to the palace were cut, so Amin had no way of knowing what was happening. When the horrendous noise of the bombing campaign reverberated through the city, he asked Jahandad, the commander of his presidential guards, what was happening. Jahandad reported that the Soviet Union was invading. Amin did not believe that the USSR would let him down in that fashion, and rebuked his subordinate. Within hours he was dead, and Jahandad's troops were being annihilated by napalm bombs and other incendiary weapons as they attempted to fight off the invaders. (Underscoring the fragility of Amin's support, his officers across the country largely did not resist the Soviet invasion.) The USSR would later claim that they had been 'invited' by the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to send troops into the country to defend socialism. As a matter of fact, Amin had pleaded with Russia to send forces to defend his narrow regime, based as it was upon the support of a fractious military cadre (mainly the officer corps rather than the rank and file), a layer of urban intellectuals, and practically no one else. He had not pleaded with them to overthrow his government and impose their preferred client regime.

What did the USSR want with Afghanistan? Even some of their supporters had difficulty working it out. Alexander Cockburn ironically extolled the virtues of the invasion as a civilising mission: "I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too..." Others insisted that Russia was there to defend the gains of the 'Saur revolution', support womens' rights, build schools for the people, overthrow the khans, etc. There is no doubt that this is what the Afghan communists wanted, and had sought to achieve through the disastrous strategy of military dictatorship.

But the idea that an exploitative and oppressive bureaucratic state like the USSR approached Afghanistan as modernising revolutionaries is tweaking the nose of credulity. The USSR valued a loyal Afghan state, from which it had been able to extract energy on its own imposed price schedules. In 1968, it had constructed a hugely successful gas pipeline from the country, so that only 3% of 2.4bn cubic meters of gas produced in the country by 1985 went to serving Afghan needs - all the rest went to Russia. The USSR also did not want that state to fall to a Muslim uprising, adding to the example of Iran and potentially setting a new example for the largely Muslim populations of the energy rich central Asian Soviet republics. Already in March 1979, inspired by the Iranian revolution, a bloody uprising had taken place in Herat against the Khalki government. Russian 'advisers' were tracked down and killed by the insurgents, before Russian bombers dropped their payloads over the city, crushing the revolt. 25,000 people were killed during that single uprising. During this revolt, a major rift emerged in the administration.

The USSR was concerned that Amin, who belonged to the 'Khalk' (People) faction of the communists, was too radical. In his place, therefore, they installed Babrak Karmal of the moderate 'Parcham' (Flag) faction. They imagined that it would be possible, through a more conservative client-state, to forge a rapprochement with the existing ruling class. Such, after all, had been their strategy in the "people's democracies" - in Romania, they rallied to the King, in Bulgaria they pledged to protect private property, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, they took already nationalised economies and preserved more or less the same personnel running them - so why should they come over all revolutionary in Afghanistan? Just to make the break with any radicalism dramatically clear, Amin's bullet-ridden body was displayed to the selected leadership of the new client regime.

The Russians, eager to scotch rumours that they had overthrown a 'socialist' ally, put it about that Amin had been making deals with the Ikhwanis (Muslim Brothers) and the CIA, and was intent on turning Afghanistan into another Chile. This claim had initially been made by Amin's rival, Taraki, and Soviet diplomats who saw Amin as a rough-hewn 'extreme Pushtu nationalist' among other things, were inclined to believe it. Amin's independent tendencies, his attempts to keep Soviet 'advisers' in their place, and pleading that the USSR revise its gas price schedule (since gas was the state's single biggest source of revenue), surely added to the suspicion. The claim would later feature in the official documentary record of the Brehznev administration recording the reasons for invasion. But it was patently false, and unsupported by any evidence. If anything, it was the USSR that would shortly be applying the methods of Pinochet against the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Of course, the CIA along with ultra-reactionary Wahabbis trained in Pakistan did have their say in Afghanistan. The US had been anxious to overthrow the Amin administration and was also, if Brzezinski is to be believed, desperate to goad the Soviet Union into invading, the better to dissipate increasingly scarce resources in an unwinnable war. From 1978, the US had been training insurgents in Pakistan, and CIA aid was being sent to Afghan insurgents six months before the USSR invaded. The division of labour that emerged was that the CIA would manage the overall project, Special Forces would train managers, and Pakistani ISI would train mujahideen. Money and support was later raised from Saudi Arabia, and logisitical cooperation developed with China. US involvement in stimulating revolt was part of the rationale offered by Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko for having voted in favour of invasion. The realpolitik analysis was the US intended to replace its lost ally in Iran with anti-Soviet bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which could then become the basis for destabilising Russia's Muslim republics. There is some truth in this. It would be utterly foolish and misleading, though, to pretend that the tribal rebellions that had been breaking out could be credited exclusively to American shit-stirring. The truth is that the Amin regime had made itself unpopular by attempting to impose dramatic change from above, without ever attempting to engage the popular majority.

As Jonathan Neale has pointed out, the rebellion against the Soviet occupation began with public protests and strikes, sometimes from those who would have been expected to support the communists. The civil servants, whom the Afghan communists had looked to as a base, went on strike. The students at a girls high school in Kabul, who had led the struggle for womens' rights, now demanded that the men fight the occupiers. In Herat, protesters gathered on the rooftops in imitation of the Iranian revolutionaries, chanting 'God is great'. More importantly, ttens of housands of ordinary Afghans outside of the cities which the Russians successfully controlled, sought out parties and organisations that could supply weapons and organisation. Many were not interested in following the line of an established party, such as the Jamiat or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb, so what emerged was a number of loose party structures based on coalitions between potentially rivalrous factions, generally pursuing the same right-wing Islamist politics with Saudi money. Given that the left, the secularists and the feminists were overwhelmingly backing the Russian invaders, the growth and appeal of such fronts was a logical - though tragic - development.

In response to this, and to the growing cost of an invasion that was supposed to be a cakewalk, the USSR sought to 'Afghanise' the war. They proposed to gradually transfer military responsibility to a well-trained Afghan army that could hold off the terrorists and defend Russian security interests. It was a complete failure. The Afghan military was well-armed, and well-trained, but it was consistently defeated by the popular resistance. In the Spring of 1988, the USSR began its withdrawal, leaving their beleaguered Afghan allies to their fate.

The war killed half a million people, wounded millions, forced millions more into fleeing as refugees. It cost Russia a total of 60 billion rubles, purely in operational terms. A Stiglitz-style report on its total costs might put the figure much higher, and it certainly kept military investment artificially high when the imperative was to reduce such spending as growth slowed down throughout the 1980s. In combination with a crippling economic crisis, (which shouldn't have affected the 'socialist countries', shurely?), the war was one of the major reasons why the USSR collapsed when it did. The defeat of Russian imperialism created a space for dissidents in the "people's republics". How could an army exhausted from defeat at the hands of Afghan peasants be expected come to the rescue of Stalinist elites in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc? And with what? Moscow's rulers were staring into an empty treasury. For the Berlin Wall to fall, the Alpha antiterrorist squad of the KGB had to fall.

But the fact that the resistance had been monopolised by the right also strengthened the landlords, the mullahs, the narco-capitalists, the warlords. The sources of oppression and exploitation that the Afghan communists had sought to defeat were left victorious to fight over the scraps of a wrecked Afghanistan. The communists lost because their understanding of socialism was that it was something that had to be imposed from above - their models were Castro, Nasser, Sukarno, developmentalist states resting on a coalition between the officer corps and the intelligentsia. And if it could be imposed by Amin, it could just as well be imposed by Brehznev. The result is that today, US imperialism can offer a nepotistic coalition of khans, drug-dealers and right-wing ruling class thieves as if it were some kind of progress. And, oh yes, they're building schools and supporting womens' rights, and...

Yes, you could talk about the fact that Afghanistan's 'election drama' (a phrase that has seemed oxymoronic in the UK of late) is becoming more farcical by the day. The US-groomed former Talib and ally of Northern Alliance warlords is, apparently, a massive fraud. His rival, a US-supporting warlord named Abdullah Abdullah, is withdrawing from the electoral spectacle on precisely those grounds. And the UN is sending its supremo in to have a bit of a nosy, and tell the natives to buck up their act and at least pretend that the freem-n-moxy that was graciously conferred on them by the US is more than a paper-thin oligarchy. Yes, as I say, you could talk about that.

Or you could talk about the regional apocalypse that is developing within the bloody embrace of NATO and Obama-style multilateralism. I wish it were redundant to spend too much time talking about the terrorising of the Afghan population by the occupiers, but it plainly isn't. Johann Hari sometimes does a good job of drawing attention to the humanitarian consequences of the war. Here, he notes that according to Lt Col Kilcullen, in recent aerial attacks the US has killed 98 civilians for every two 'insurgents' killed. If that ratio holds for the air war as a rule, then consider that the US is currently boasting of having killed up to 25,000 insurgents. 25k is 2% of 1.25m. Lacking a Lancet-style cluster survey, one can only make an educated guess as to whether such a figure is approximately realistic. There was one cluster survey carried out for the first nine months of the invasion and occupation, which estimated that 10,000 civilians had been killed, the majority from air attacks. A similar survey today would be reporting the effects of a far more intense aerial campaign, in a war lasting for eight years now. Who can say that the soaring use of cluster bombs, daisy cutters, 'smart' missiles aimed at wedding parties, drone-based ordnance, and the usual deposits of unexploded ordnance, will have harvested a negligible number of bodies? I just venture that, were this to be properly investigated, levels of mortality way well exceed those in Iraq.

Further, nowhere is the point sufficiently taken that these consequences are an intended, deliberate, and considered outcome of the aggression. It is not just that as the US transfers the risks of its operations to the civilian population through high-octane aerial attacks, it necessarily leads to a perhaps undesired but accepted level of civilian slaughter. It is that the distinction between civilian and combatant is being eroded as rapidly as it was in Vietnam. The Afghan population has simply become, in the context of a guerilla war, part of the enemy. NATO planners know full well that the insurgency couldn't sustain a heavy presence in 80% of the territory, and effectively take over the Nuristan province, without the backing of a socially significant layer of the population. I would infer that the intention of constant attacks on civilian population centres is to terrorise the population - perhaps with the hope that whatever measly and corrupt civilian programmes are being promulgated can 'win hearts and minds' at some point in the increasingly distant future.

The second point is that we are witnessing anew the way in which imperialism and nationalism can intersect to bloodily reconstruct the geography and political economy of whole regions. Such is the history of the Indian subcontinent during and after colonial rule. There was little in the history of Muslims and Hindus in India to give rise to any apprehension of the schism that would arise in the 1930s, never mind the calamity that would unfold with partition in 1947 - 90 years after an uprising uniting Muslims and Hindus had delivered India's first body blow to the British behemoth. The story of India's division is an extraordinarily rapid one, in which the divide and rule policies of the British - some of whose deadly fruits were borne again this year in Sri Lanka - interacted with the independence struggle that took off in the 1920s following the Russian revolution and the 1919 Amritsar massacre. In Uttar Pradesh, a highly mixed region notable for its role in the 1857 uprising, the British authorities had already used such tactics by, eg, acceding to demands that Hindi be the official language of the region. As Indian struggles wrung forms of electoral representation from the British, the colonial power insisted that voters identify themselves on a communal basis. One major example of such divide-and-rule was the attempted partition of Bengal in 1905, then a mixed state in the east of India. That was succesfully resisted, but the basic policy of attempting to foment divisions based on confession remained.

This became important in the independence struggle as upper and middle class Indian Muslims whose position had been established through the colonial state sought to be included in any future settlement. The Muslim League, founded in 1906, was initially loyal to the British crown, and sought to promote these interests, and had supported the partition of Bengal on the basis that it was good for Indian Muslims. The British patronised the League for this reason. Until the 1937 elections, however, the majority of Indian Muslims had sought representation in a future independent polity through the Indian National Congress. The turn to other forms of political expression, some class-based and others confessional, resulted from Congress refusing to work in coalition with the Muslim League in government, which aroused fears that it would be a de facto communal power. (In truth, the Congress had allowed a certain blurring of the edges between secular nationalism and Hindu communalism by permitting joint membership of Congress and Hindu Mahasabha until the early 1930s. Much of its leadership was reactionary and sectarian, and the inspirations for avowedly secular Indian nationalism often included dubious Hindu communalist figures such as the writer Bankim Chattopadhyay.) By 1940, the Muslim League was campaigning for a Muslim state to be named Pakistan, including Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan, the North West Frontier Province and Bengal. Jinnah, who was no sectarian and had attempted to broker unity with the Congress, had concluded that Muslims and Hindus were two nations.

It turns out that there were more than two potential nations in there. India was first divided at the cost of 1 million lives. Then, as the Pakistani state came under the domination of the military in 1957, it escalated its practises of discrimination and oppression against the more populous eastern 'half' of the country, and thus sparking an independence struggle which it unsuccessfully attempted to suppress with near genocidal violence. It might have succeeded had it not provoked Indian intervention. But Pakistan was divided at a cost up to 3m civilian lives. Kashmir has remained a running sore and an object of military rivalry between India and Pakistan. Whatever happens to Kashmir, it has cost up to thousands of lives every year. And today, the authority of the Pakistani state over substantial swathes of its territory is in question - not because of fundamentalism, but because the state is unable to meet the needs of the population, and is instead devoting resources and firepower to fighting its own front in the 'war on terror'. Obama's $7.5bn aid package is supposed to help overcome this, but the conditions that come with this commit the Pakistani state to a prolonged, expensive and destabilising war (admittedly with the assistance of Xe, née Blackwater). It also infringes further on the polite fiction of Pakistani sovereignty by demanding more and larger US permanent military bases in the country. The military is divided over this strategy, and - despite much bravado - is unable to control south Waziristan or the Swat valley. It is taking sustained blows in major cities such as Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Islamabad. Some of the attacks reportedly aren't even coming from Talibs, but are mutinies from within. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas, created by the British to contain Pashtun revolt, are now a faultline in the 'war on terror'. The North-West Frontier Province, originally annexed from the Emirate of Afghanistan, may as well now be an autonomous region of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's viability as a national state is also now in question. The US has attempted to control the country using largely Uzbek warlords, with a handpicked, carefully groomed and scented Pashtun leader. Whoever 'won' the Afghan election wouldn't be able to claim much legitimate authority outside of Kabul. Lacking much of a fiscal base, it is almost entirely dependent on US and donor funding, aid projects, World Bank programmes etc. Even if the Taliban and its associates were decisively defeated, it is hard to see this fractious bunch of mercenaries emerging into a coherent national ruling class, since their brand of highly profitable narco-capitalism comes with military competition and territorial struggle built in. The insurgency (not yet convinced by the insights of satyagraha for some reason), has marginally better chances. It has more national cohesion than the warlord factions do, but is inherently self-limiting by its rootedness in one dominant ethnic group and its reactionary ideology. Of course, the Taliban have proven to be capable of reinventing themselves, but that still doesn't mean they have a remotely plausible social vision. At best, they would be capable of forming an authoritarian nationalist coalition with some defecting warlord groups. It is hard to see a coherent national movement emerging here. If anything, the trend is toward a combination of regionalism and localism.

NATO imperialism is thus intersecting with national and regional politics in such a way now as to accelerate the centrifugal trends already in evidence. The legacy of British 'nation-building' in southern Asia has at times commanded applause and admiration from some of the intelligentsia, but it is a legacy that we are constantly living with no less than with the current reality of US empire. In both the long and the short view, the 'divide and quit' settlement has actually been catastrophic. Its problems may have been resolved more amicably and less bloodily if not for constant outside subventions, the pressures of the Cold War, the coopting of the Pakistani military, the creation of a layer of reactionary Wahabbis to fight Afghan communists and then the USSR etc. That the one force capable of subverting the barbaric heritage of colonial nation-building, international socialism, meets the present challenge in an historically weak state, only adds to the presentiment of grave danger.