According to latest accounts, about a million people have been displaced by the recent Pakistani army operations against the Taliban in the Swat valley region. Lakhs of people are already living in tents, while lakhs of others are on the roads, fleeing the guns and bombs.  Not since the Partition in 1947 has Pakistan seen such a large number of displaced people.  The situation in Swat has exacerbated the spiraling crisis in Pakistan, and further pushed up the overall level of violence and insecurity in the country.

The turning of this region right in the heart of Pakistan into a war zone is a direct fallout of the current US regime’s cynical “Af-pak” strategy, which has extended the scope of the fighting in Afghanistan to include Pakistan as well.  According to the logic of the US imperialists, the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan is the reason they are unable to defeat those fighting their eight year-long occupation of Afghanistan.  By stepping up their aerial assaults on the Pakistan regions bordering Afghanistan, spreading global hysteria about Pakistan’s nuclear establishment ‘falling into’ Taliban hands, and making barely veiled threats to step up their military involvement in Pakistan if the Pakistani government didn’t take on the Taliban and other fighters itself, the Obama regime has pressured the Pakistani government into waging an all-out war against its own people. 

The mounting violence in Pakistan, driven by the US imperialist objectives in this region, poses a grave threat to the peace and security of all the countries in our region. Some pundits of the establishment in India are claiming that Pakistan’s preoccupation with the troubles in Swat and elsewhere, and the US insistence that Pakistan step up its war against the Taliban, are in India’s ‘national interests’.  They claim that it is diverting Pakistan’s and global public attention from the festering sore in Kashmir, and can barely hide their glee at Pakistan’s troubles. This is a cynical and dangerously misleading idea that fails to recognise that it is US imperialism that poses the greatest danger to the sovereignty and security of India. The further unfolding of the US imperialist strategy for domination in this region will only mean a much greater threat to India.  The ruling Indian bourgeoisie thinks that it can ride the American tiger to checkmate Pakistan and bolster its own clout in the region.  But this is a dangerous illusion that spells only greater calamity for the Indian people.

For a solution to the many political problems in this region, the essential precondition is that all forms of overt and covert involvement by the US and other imperialist powers in the entire region must be ended. The peoples of the different countries of South Asia must unitedly oppose foreign interference in the region and come up with their own solutions to their problems free of all outside pressure and dictate.