Speaking of bungled acts of repression, the Egyptian military's assault on protesters after last Friday's mass protest has revived the country's revolutionary movement and (so I hear) put a general strike on the agenda.  Tahrir Square has been retaken.  This image (left) shows what the square looked like on Friday.  Following the protest, which was against the military council's usurpation of dictatorial power, dozens of people decided to stay on in the square overnight.  They were assaulted by troops using tear gas and rubber bullets in a bid to clear the square.  The resulting uproar saw tens of thousands drawn back out onto the square.  Repeated assaults seem only to have broadened the array of groups willing to stand against the military.  Beyond Tahrir, there have been mass protests in Alexandria and Suez, among other places.  The assembly of forces looks remarkably similar to that in February - trade unionists, liberals, socialists, Nasserists and Islamists, all out against the regime.  There are now calls for international solidarity as the revolutionary movement, in tens of thousands not dozens, faces down rubber bullets and tear gas.  The country's trade unions are calling for their 1.4m members to join protesters in the Tahrir Square sit-in.  The struggle is still 'in the balance', as it were, but what a turnaround.

For a time, it seemed as if the armed forces would control the tempo of events.  Elections would proceed in the manner prescribed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and most significant forces would participate.  The army would incite sectarianism against coptic Christians, and murder them with impunity.  The leadership of the Muslim Brothers - expecting to do well in any prospective elections under the banner of the Freedom and Justice Party - would tend to side with the army in maintaining 'order' against those leftists, liberals and Islamists who antagonised the new ruling order.  Indeed, at a crucial moment in July, a mass Islamist rally in Tahrir appeared to show that the alliance between the military and sections of the Islamists was being consolidated.  Salafists, jihadis and Muslim Brothers chanted slogans in favour of national unity, while speakers defended the SCAF.  The mobilisations of liberals and leftists against the regime, by contrast, looked small.  Shortly after the rally, armed thugs were sent by the army to assault opposition supporters camped in Tahrir Square.

Some, in response to this situation, went so far as to declare the revolutionary process at an end.  Others descended into indiscriminate rants about Islamists, and enjoined us to remember Iran, 1979.  Here was a case of Islamist counter-revolution if ever there was one.  Since many of the people I am referring to (I'm being deliberately vague, not to avoid giving offence, but to ensure that the offence is taken widely) are marxists, it is odd that their mistakes were so liberal.  They began and ended their assessment of the forces assembled in Egypt on the basis of an ascribed ideology, with little or no reference to class or other political determinants.  Whether or not ideology plays the dominant role in situating actors in a given struggle surely depends on the circumstances, but the imperative to be concrete was blithely evaded.  Abstraction governed their responses.  Relatedly, even while restricting the discussion to ideology, their discussion of that level of struggle was curiously flattened: Islamism was treated not as a complex, incoherent and frequently antagonistic combination of elements, but as a spiritual totality reducible to an incorrigible reactionary essence. 

So, it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers.  We needn't deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play.  They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation.  But, where they have supported progressive political struggles - for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship - they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations.  The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation.  In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists.  The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.

Thirty three people have been killed by armed forces in Tahrir Square since Friday.  The level of brutality is shocking.  I understand that the military opened fire with live rounds on protesters as they attempted to storm the Interior Ministry.  Yet, as you can see, the response from the revolutionaries continues to be defiant:

The military appears to be producing a situation from which there can be no return.  Either they will consolidate their power as a new despotism with a slender democratic facade - and elections are now in doubt - or they will be decisively weakened, and a new alignment of democratic forces will have the initiative.  As the revolutionaries of Egypt say, Glory to the martyrs, Victory to the revolution, Power and wealth to the people.

So, it turns out that the Norwegian terror suspect who murdered an estimated 91 people, most of whom were kids, was in contact with the EDL, whom he admired and wished to emulate:

There has been a lengthy queue of ostensible experts filing into broadcasting suites and newsrooms - and no doubt policy chambers and intelligence briefing rooms as well - who have maintained until the last hour that this was definitely jihadism.  The basis for this was feeble from the beginning.  They said it must be the cartoons controversy, or Afghanistan (though Norway is a secondary player in that crusade).  They said it must be Mullah Krekar, the small-time Kurdish Islamist, taking revenge for actions taken against him by the Norwegian state.  (Ironically, even the meshuggeneh Harry's Place has done better on average than most of the papers.)  I don't mind telling you that I think this was wish fulfilment.  That is, I think that these pundits and their employers largely would have liked nothing better than for it to be an Islamist attack, because then they have a set of responses that they can energetically put into motion, and a pre-determined narrative around which they can cohere those responses.  Far right racists murdering young leftists, on the other hand, is not a subject on which they can rapidly form plausible responses.

Now, readers of this blog will be aware that there have been many, many foiled terror plots by far right activists in the UK alone.  This has failed to receive the sort of attention that similar attempts by Islamists would generate.  With the spread of fascism across Europe, these people are beginning to receive a degree of ideological and organisational sustenance that they might previously have lacked.  It's no good looking to security measures or intelligence-led operations to deal with this problem.  It is a political problem, and it has to be combatted politically through the assembly of anti-fascist coalitions capable of frustrating and isolating the organisational bases of fascism in the continent.  This is a task that becomes all the more urgent in the high stakes battles over austerity.

The revolutionaries demanded Mubarak's overthrow, and insisted that Suleiman should not be put in charge. They have won that. They demanded that the NDP-dominated parliament be prorogued in the interim before elections, and the constitution suspended. They have won that. But they also demanded that between now and elections, there should be a collective, civilian governing council, that the emergency law should be terminated, that unions and parties should have the right to form without the permission of the state. They haven't won that. The army has instead taken control, is attempting to dismantle the democracy village in Tahrir Square, and has been arresting activists today. This does not mean that the army is going to get its way over the future of Egypt, or even that its hesitant, faltering efforts today - and they did falter - represent anything but a tentative foot in the water, an attempt to see if something like order can be restored. In fact, the army's premature provocation resulted in thousands of people pouring back into the square, some rough confrontations, and eventually groups of army and police standing around looking perplexed. Some police even came to the square pleading to be accepted as comrades of the revolution. The army will have to concede some form of representative electoral system, with some basic political freedoms. The state will be weakened in its repressive capacity, and the government will be strengthened in its representative capacity. But the precise balance of forces in the new polity has still to be decided, and in particular the army's central role has to be negotiated (and struggled against). Everything the army does, therefore - whether they decide to keep the NDP men in place or throw them aside, for example - has to be read in terms of their determination to remain in charge.

The army's manoeuvering now is presumably aimed at breaking up the remarkably broad coalition that was first assembled in 2006. This has included of course the Muslim Brothers, the Nasserist 'Karama' party, the Labour Party (which is Islamist), the Tagammu Party (leftist), the Revolutionary Socialists (self-explanatory), Kefaya (an alliance which includes many of the above elements), the Ghad Party (a liberal offshoot of the Wafdists which was the first party to be approached by Mubarak for negotiations), and Mohammed El Baradei's National Alliance for Change. It has to be said that the alliance might have been quite difficult to maintain if the left had taken the sectarian attitude of some of the older layers of marxists who basically maintained that the Muslim Brothers were a tool of the capitalist class, simply an ally of neoliberalism and imperialism, and so on. The Revolutionary Socialists played a key role in overcoming that. Samir Najib, working in the Centre for Socialist Studies, argued that it was vital to understand that the Muslim Brothers as in part a movement of the oppressed, involving many rank and file activists who came from poor and working class backgrounds. Some of them had been on the Left, and been alienated from the Left because of their experiences under Nasser and because of the way the poor bore the brunt of the crisis that marked the latter years of the Nasser regime. He argued that socialists should act independently of the Islamists, but not dismissively of them. They should defend them when they were opposed to the state on issues such as the emergency laws, or the independence of the judiciary, and should be prepared to work with them on democratic demands. Such was an important argument in preparing the socialist Left to be directly involved in, rather than secluded from, the mass movements that have precipitated Mubarak's downfall. The subsequent alliance also meant that the Muslim Brothers were more sensitive to criticism, as when they were forced to recant on their 'Islam is the solution' slogan in 2005, which Christians and socialists argued was sectarian.

The army's strategy of forcing a transition managed by the armed forces themselves is partly possible because both Mohammed El Baradei and the Muslim Brothers appear to have supported an army takeover to avert an all-out social explosion. One expects that, though they were the slowest to support the recent revolution, they will be the first to be consulted by the armed forces. Under Mubarak, the Muslim Brothers were effectively coopted, operating as a loyal opposition. There were and remain tensions in the organisation between the businessmen and professionals who dominate the leadership and the poorer base, with more radical layers wanting to take a more uncompromising stance, and these started to come to the fore in the context of the Second Intifada. This building pressure contributed to the decision by the Muslim Brothers to form an alliance with left-wing and secular forces to depose Mubarak back in 2006. So, it would be mistaken to assume that the rank and file of the Brothers will necessarily accept whatever carve-up the leadership opts for. Similarly, while many of the leading middle class activists are declaring the revolution to be over, effectively throwing in the towel before they've even secured the minimal political and democratic rights that they are in it for, there is likely to be a mass of middle class radicals who will continue to want to fight. I expect they'll be among the thousands of people who remained in Tahrir Square as of today.

Internationally, the armed forces seem determined to hold on to Egypt's current role. The indications so far are that the Camp David peace treaty with Israel, which underpins the Palestinians' miserable plight and Egypt's participation in the seige of Gaza, is to be maintained. This is purchased with $1.5bn a year in aid plus training, but it's also part of a global orientation of power predicated on US-led neoliberalism. Again, the army's task is made slightly easier here, because El Baradei supports the peace treaty. The Muslim Brothers do not, but they are highly unlikely to push for its abrogation. Unless an alternative orientation for capital accumulation emerges, the Egyptian ruling class will likely continue to seek a profitable alliance with the US. Only the continuation of the popular movements can force an alternative path.

It seems clear enough that the revolution has further convulsions to go. It seems equally clear that the alliance which led to this revolution is going to be reconfigured. Juan Cole has long argued that this revolution was centrally based on the labour movement, the alliance of blue and white collar workers that first emerged in 2006. This has united textile workers with tax collectors. But the movement has also been characterised by a fairly broad alliance between the most militant sections of the working class and the liberal and radical sections of the middle class, the latter including lawyers, doctors, probably a lot of small businessmen not integrated into the regime, and so on. The focus, in the Anglophone media, on the Twitterati, may have overstated the relevance of the middle class, but they did not fabricate their role. In the current situation, it is often the small businessmen and middle class professionals (like the Google marketing head Wael Ghonim, currently in a meeting with the higher council of the armed forces) who are in a hurry to call an end to hostilities. They want to get back to earning money. The accent is shifting far more clearly to the organised working class. Perhaps more serious than today's arrests, then, is the attempted banning of labour activism. This is where a new front of struggle is going to be opened up.

Soumayya Ghannouchi, the Guardian columnist and daughter of the Tunisian An-Nahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi, argues for a coalition of socialists, liberals and Islamists to overthrow the Tunisian state. Rachid himself argues for exactly this approach in his interview with the FT:

We cannot bring out a democratic system out of this corrupt, dictatorial system. We have to put an end to the authoritarian system and start a new one. Basing this transition on Article 56 or 57 is a continuation of the old system. The constitution was a tyranny, the state was reduced to one man, who had in his hands the executive, judicial and legislative powers and was not accountable to anyone. How can such a constitution point towards building a democratic system, even as a starting point.

The first step of building a democratic system is to build a democratic constitution. For this we need a founding council for rebuilding the state, one in which political parties, the trade unions and the civil society join. This council will rebuild the democratic constitution and will be the basis for building the democratic system.

In lieu of a proper analysis, forthcoming, here are some more materials for those following the Tunisian revolution. First, read Juan Cole: "it would be wrong to see the revolution only as a middle class movement against corruption and nepotism, fueled by facebook status updates and youth activism. The trade unions (al-niqabat) played an essential role, and were among those demanding the departure of the president. You don’t get massive crowds like the one in Tunis without a lot of workers joining in. There are few labor correspondents any longer, and the press downplays the role of workers as a result of neither having good sources among them nor an adequate understanding of the importance of labor mobilization. It is no accident that on Wednesday the head of the Communist workers movement was arrested (he has been released)." Then, for more background background, see MERIP's country report on the origins of the Ben Ali dictatorship here. Hossam el-Hamalawy provides a plethora of links and material on his blog, and via Twitter. And for regular updates and analysis, see the Angry Arab and Brian Whitaker's blog.

I've been following the Tower Hamlets mayoral race with great interest. Tower Hamlets is said to be in line for some of the worst cuts in Britain, and the outcome of the mayoral race will tell us something about how much resistance the Tories will meet in the East End. For those who have not been following the story, what you need to know is that the Labour Party has shot itself in the foot by deselecting its popularly chosen candidate, the former Tower Hamlets council leader, Lutfur Rahman. Rahman had defeated his nearest rival by a clear margin of over 17% of the total vote: of 881 votes, Rahman won 433 votes. His nearest rival John Biggs won 251 votes. Cllr. Helal Abbas received. 157 votes.

Cllr. Abbas responded to this outcome by accusing his victorious rival of having 'pocket' (fake) members supporting him, and of introducing an atmosphere of intimidation in the council. He claimed that the Islamic Forum of Europe had "brainwashed" Rahman, about which more in a moment. I should stress that these allegations would, even if true, have no bearing on the outcome of the selection, which was run by the regional Labour Party, and where only identifiable members with photo ID were allowed to participate. But Labour, apparently determined to replace Rahman, dealt with the issue at a chaotic NEC meeting, allowing the chosen candidate no opportunity to refute the allgations. They suspended him, deselected him by fiat and chose Abbas instead - the least popular of the main three candidates, and the man whom they had previously imposed as council leader after the local elections gave Labour more councillors in Tower Hamlets.

Now Rahman is standing as an independent candidate, backed both by Respect and, I would gather, much of the London Labour left. Eight local Labour councillors have already been expelled for backing Rahman, along with a number of officers and members. Labour's mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone has expressed support for Rahman. He has said that it was a "moment of madness" for Labour to replace Rahman after having just rebuilt the local party following Oona King's defeat in 2005. He's not wrong. Respect had made it clear that they would back the Labour candidate as Rahman was a popular candidate whose policies were close to their own. Labour could have taken this powerful executive post with no difficulty had it stuck with Rahman. Instead, in a spiteful and petty act, the NEC attempted to establish the Blairites' control over a region that has an established propensity for rebelling against such encroachments.

This is the culmination of a Muslim-baiting war by the managerialist right-wing in local Labour circles, fronted by Jim Fitzpatrick MP, with the connivance of Tory media and Andrew Gilligan. You'll recall that a Dispatches documentary for Channel 4, made by Gilligan, claimed that Rahman had become council leader with the assistance of the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), a group close to the Jamaat e-Islami in Bangladesh, and had distributed millions in council funds to organisations supported by the IFE. Specifically, it was claimed, Rahman had helped turn ten million pounds in public funding over to the East London Mosque, which is allied to the IFE. (The mosque refutes these claims). Fitzpatrick alleged that the IFE had 'infiltrated' the local Labour council. The documentary concluded that the IFE was attempting to impose an Islamic social and political order on everyone else. These and subsequent allegations made by Gilligan at his blog on the Daily Telegraph website were cited by senior Labourites in the NEC's decision to suspend Rahman. Indeed, when it was decided that the candidate would be selected by the local members, Andrew Gilligan expostulated in disbelief that the Labour leadership would allow something like this to happen - didn't they know that Labour members were IFE affiliates and would just pick one of their Islamist brothers to lead the revolution?

What of these allegations? Most of the prosecution witnesses, if you like, were either notable Islamophobes or, like Fitzpatrick (then defending an 8000 majority against George Galloway) had a direct interest in representing their opponents as frontmen for an Islamist incursion. The documentary was denounced by a wide array of trade unionists, leftists and liberals for whipping up racist hatred and giving the EDL an excuse to (try to) march on the East End. Discounting for this, for the shrill reactionary politics of the documentary, and for any factual leaps that it may have made, what is left? It is well known that the IFE is influential locally, and that it is socially conservative. It is also well known that the IFE has backed Labour and Respect candidates in the past. There is also a complex and murky history of municipal clientelism, and not only in the East End, wherein Labour politicians make deals with local businessmen and lobby groups to help get elected. Labour Party member Dave Osler describes some of this history here. But I see no evidence that the IFE has taken over the Labour Party, nor is it remotely plausible that the IFE has such weight that it could impose Lutfur Rahman as the leader of the local council. Even if its influence allowed it to extract public funds on a clientelist basis, this is unlikely to be anything more than standard rent-seeking behaviour. And clientelism isn't going to be dealt with and finished off on the basis of racist scaremongering, any more than 19th century 'machine politics' was terminated by scapegoating the Irish. The idea that there's an Islamist plot to impose a theocracy on the East End of London is a paranoid racist fantasy.

Nor, I might add, does it seem plausible that Rahman is the IFE's Manchurian Candidate. Regardless, Fitzpatrick and his supporters continued to push the idea that the East End was on the brink of an Islamist takeover and that Rahman was at the centre of this web of conspiracy. This witch hunt brought to its hysterical culmination in the pages of the tabloids and the Telegraph, the Labour establishment prepared Rahman's auto de fé, deposing him as council leader as soon as the 2010 elections were concluded. Cllr. Abbas' allegations are thus continuous with this witch hunt, inasmuch as Rahman is depicted as an 'Islamofascist' terrorising the community. They are also of a piece with his own previous careerist manoueverings, which at one staged involved him in an alliance with... well, one Lutfur Rahman. No surprise there - the careerist's only permanent friend is himself.

But what is the difference of substance between the two candidates? Judging from their campaigns, there is a straightforward left-right divide. Rahman considers himself a social democrat to the left of Cllr Helal Abbas. Oliur Rahman, the former Respect councillor and recently expelled Labour councillor, says: "Lutfur introduced the London living wage for Tower Hamlets council workers. We bought back council houses and rehoused over 500 overcrowded households. We started building over 1,000 social homes. These are just some of the policies Lutfur implemented. If he’s not mayor, things will go the opposite way. If elected he will fight to save jobs and services." Lutfur Rahman has pledged to oppose the government's cuts. At any rate, the result will make a material difference to the council's decisions. I understand that the council is currently holding back on some of its cuts and job losses until the outcome of the election is known. Abbas' campaign, by contrast, focuses on "social cohesion". You don't need me to tell you what that means. But if you're baffled, I'll point you in the direction of Rushanara Ali MP. Ali, of course, has a personal beef with Rahman for refusing to publicly endorse in the election against her rival, Respect candidate Abjol Miah, and her views were taken into consideration in the decision to suspend Rahman. It's a clear choice, then, between unpleasant bullies who have a patent disregard for democracy and whose message to ethnic minorities is to behave better than everyone else, be above reproach and effectively capitulate to racist hatemongers, and a campaign by the victor in the contest to be the Labour candidate who is foregrounding the material needs of the working class, such as housing and incomes.

The Labour NEC's decision was perhaps predictable, but it is still self-destructive. Dave Hill, no supporter of Rahman, reports 'whispers' from the Abbas campaign that the wind is going Rahman's way. Even if Labour pulls its campaign back from the brink, the fruits of this deranged kulturkampf will mostly be harvested in the form of a depleted and demoralised base, an even more arrogant, tyrannical and disconnected Labour establishment, and a re-fuelled racist hysteria that can only benefit the far right.

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.

The belief that we live in Enlightened times, that the prevailing cosmovision is scientific and rational, is itself a component of an irrational and violent ideology. We do not live in such a time, and the intelligentsia do not produce work reflecting such commitments. Rather, the great bulk of intellectual production is a labour of fabulation. Histories are aesthetic products, stimulating narratives for those bored with the novel, morality tales for those disenchanted with religion, improving sentiments and axioms for those who don't want to spend their tube journey deflecting anxiety about work with a copy of the Metro. The efficacy of these works as aesthetic productions, dealing in irony, allusion and juxtaposition, and using tragic, romantic or comedic modes of emplotment, is part of their proof, part of their ability to persuade.

So, in the interminable era of the 'war on terror', we have been fed a slurry of literature rehearsing the apocalyptic dramaturgy of Oswald Spengler and his epigones. The key actor, the hero, is the corporative entity known as 'The West'. It is locked in a mortal combat, a fight to the death, with the villain, a relentless and tyrannical opponent, known as 'radical Islam' or 'Islamo-fascism' or 'totalitarianism', tout court. The ideas of 'totalitarianism' constitute the deux ex machina, the animating spirit that subjectivates an otherwise inert substrata of humanity, and sends it rushing, ululating, en masse, toward Jerusalem or New York.

The latest installment of this narrative is provided by the American Eustonite, Jeffrey Herf (criticised by Richard Wolin here, resulting in a debate here). Disinterring, once again, the collusion between Haj Amin al-Husseini, the British-imposed Mufti of Jerusalem, and Adolf Hitler, Herf sets out make the case that 'radical Islam' constitutes the third wave of 'totalitarianism' in the world, following communism and fascism. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Can a gripping narrative be concocted from such hackneyed materials? Not by Herf, it can't. His efforts to add panache and colour to an utterly forlorn parable revolve around the single narrative conceit of 'Hate Radio', in which pro-Nazi broadcasts in Arab countries during WWII, to some extent facilitated by al-Husseini, are 'hate radio with a vengeance'. The sparsity of evidence for the larger case he wants to make is compensated for with tenuous extrapolations and sensational quotations. The denouement involves one particularly bestial broadcast, inciting the massacre of the Jews in the Arab countries, just as the Nazis were embarking on the final solution. Such viciousness, Herf maintains, found a receptive audience. His evidence doesn't permit too much extrapolation - he can refer to 'elements' in the Egyptian officer corps and the Muslim Brothers whom Berlin thought might be willing to act on such ideas. Herf writes:

Two German historians, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, recently uncovered evidence that German intelligence agents were reporting back to Berlin that if Rommel succeeded in reaching Cairo and Palestine, the Axis powers could count on support from some elements in the Egyptian officer corps as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. Mallmann and Cüppers also show that an SS division was preparing to fly to Egypt to extend the Final Solution to the Middle East. The British and Australian defeat of Rommel at the Battle of El 'Alamein prevented that from happening.

I assume that Herf is referring to an article by Mallmann and Cüppers in the journal Yad Vashem Studies, vol 36, in which the two historians outline a plan to send a unit under SS-Obsturmbannfuhrer Walter Rauth to conquer Egypt, and then proceed to Palestine where, the authors write, "it undoubtedly would see action directed primarily against the Jewish population there". This 'undoubtedly' is not warranted by any evidence cited, but even if it were, I am not persuaded that this amounts to evidence of a plan to "extend the Final Solution to the Middle East". Nor is it obvious that the "elements" identified by the Nazis would have proven amenable to such a programme.

For, as Herf's case proceeds, the connections become all the more tenuous. He asks: "How was Nazi propaganda received by Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East?" He cites an evaluation from the OSS referring to 'apathy' in the Middle East regarding the trial of Nazis, and 'sympathy' for those who aided the Axis due to their hostility to the imperialists. This isn't particularly compelling as evidence, nor would it be surprising if it contained some truth, given the jackbooted behaviour of the colonial powers. It explains and demonstrates precious little. An interesting question would be, how did Arab public opinion receive the vicious exterminationist broadcast inciting genocide against the Jews, the one that Herf is at pains to quote at length? Did anyone actually carry out this genocide, or attempt to? Herf demonstrates no such conspiracy. Nor does he demonstrate that antisemitic ideas had much popular traction.

Instead, what he does is show that Hassan al-Banna of the Muslim Brothers celebrated al-Husseini as a "hero" who "challenged an empire and fought Zionism" through his alliance with the Nazis. Now, al-Banna was both an antisemite and and anti-Zionist. His analysis, in common with many variants of Islamism, was that Western imperialism had destroyed and dislocated Islamic forms of sociability, and that this was being driven by a disintegrative Jewish minority. This has to be registered. But in Herf's polemic, anti-Zionism is uncomplicatedly conflated with antisemitism. Obviously, the two are related, but Herf wants to assert a unidirectional causality: Islamists were anti-Zionist because they were antisemitic - not the other way around, and not because Zionism was itself a colonizing movement that posed a grave menace not just to Palestinians but to other Arab countries in their struggle against colonialism.

As Herf indicates in his debate with Wolin, he considers the 'totalitarian' ideas of 'radical Islam' to be responsible for the majority of problems in the Middle East, denying that it is in any sense a response to external aggression. Here, he relies on a red herring, pointing out that Western interventions since 1945 cannot have substantially caused the rise of Islamism, whose key doctrines were in place before that point. As if 'Western interventions' did not include the construction of the Suez canal, the subsequent colonization of Egypt, the scramble for Africa, the Mandates, etc etc. Might it not be of some interest that Mawdudi and al-Banna, two key figures in the founding of modern Islamism, operated in two countries (India and Egypt) which experienced a particularly savage form of colonial domination from quite early on? Does the doctrine of Islamic restoration espoused by Mawdudi have anything to do with the seige mentality created by British rule and its impact on traditional forms of life? Does his success in attracting post-Partition migrants to the Jamaat-e-Islami have anything to do with a cynical 'divide and quit' policy pursued by the British? If one wants to discuss and anatomise the ideas of these movements, it is not possible to do so without discussing the colonial labyrinth in which they fermented, not to mention the post-colonial systems of domination in which they expanded.

But that is not the kind of history that Herf is interested in. He wants to establish a precarious genealogy of ideas, no matter how tenuous and slender the interconnecting branches are. Thus, he notes that Qutb, an intellectual source for that brand of salafism purveyed by 'Al Qaeda', was an antisemite who claimed that Hitler had been sent by Allah to punish the Jews. This stands as one, utterly frail, limb connecting the Third Reich to the 9/11 attacks. He then recites the antisemitism of the Hamas 'charter', having also previously reminded readers of Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-denial, noting that these are forms of antisemitism which originate in Europe. This is, of course, true, but it does not establish a direct channel from the Third Reich to the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Yet this is how, through a series of metonymic substitutions, we get from Nazi broadcasts and al-Husseini to Qutb and Banna, to the Islamic revolution in Iran, to Hamas and, ultimately, to Al Qaeda - an extremely diverse range of groups, movements and individuals, who appear to share nothing more than that they have espoused antisemitism and that they want to establish some form of Islamic polity. This isn't so much a narrative as a montage of fragments, quotes, anecdotes, particles of forensic evidence, and extravagant claims.

In fact, this kind of allusion and juxtaposition is central to the case. As Wolin points out, the vectors of 'totalitarian' influence allegedly extend not just through 'radical Islamists', but also through the "Arab radicals" referred to in the original article. Thus, it is pointed out that Nasser recruited a former Nazi to work for his information ministry. This is, Wolin adds, not much of a case for anything given that the CIA recruited many, many Nazis for its global counterrevolutionary programmes. It isn't even particularly germane to the case. A secular anticolonial nationalist who tortured his Islamist opponents, Nasser can neither be considered a promulgator of Nazism or of any variant of 'political Islam'. But, as with previous incarnations of 'antitotalitarian' history, notably that vulgar treatise by Paul Berman written to justify the Iraq war, the point about 'totalitarianism' is that 'Arab radicals', 'Islamists', communists and fascists are all fungible. Or rather, in the puree of 'totalitarianism', they are indistinguishable. Thus, Berman had no scruple about describing Ba'athism as a variant of 'Muslim' or 'Islamic' 'totalitarianism'. Only through such pedestrian narrative devices is it possible to assert that there is at this time a movement against 'the West' that is comparable in its ideas, its coherency, scope and threat, to the Third Reich.

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...