Corridor of uncertainty: Pakistan bats for nationalist interest amid U.S.-China match

While Imran Khan, Pakistan’s next prime minister, is already leaning toward China, the regional power’s old bedfellow, U.S. imperialism, still has cards to play.
Since the collapse of workers’ states in Russia and China, the rivalry between the world’s leading imperialist powers continues to drive world events. Today, as a declining U.S. struggles to fend off a rising China, various smaller powers are jockeying for alliances with either one or both.
The latest hotspot is Pakistan, where the local capitalist bosses selected Khan, a one-time cricket superstar who rolled to a heavily rigged election victory July 25 (see page 5). The erratic celebrity candidate was backed by the military, which has ruled Pakistan for half its history. He was chosen for his popularity and support among young workers in particular, and most of all because Pakistan’s rulers are desperate to keep the impoverished masses and a growing middle class in line amid economic crisis.
Leading up to the election, members of opposition parties were harassed and arrested. Others were forced by military intelligence agencies to join Khan’s  Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Criminal cases have been opened against nearly 17,000 opposition party supporters, and corruption investigations launched against several opposition party leaders (Guardian,7/21).
Workers in Pakistan are fed up with poor sanitation, roving black outs, high unemployment and religious violence.  The reality, however,  is that their material conditions will continue to deteriorate unless they break with dead-end politicians like Khan and join a movement to build a communist world, free of imperialist conquest and exploitation.
Big terror, little terror
Not so long ago, Pakistan was a major pillar of U.S. imperialism and a hedge against Soviet-leaning India. By 2001, after 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, U.S. military aid to Pakistan amounted to billions of dollars a year. The Pakistani bosses’ threw their public support behind the U.S. rulers’ “War on Terror” against the U.S. bosses’ own former creation, the Taliban, and its Al Qaeda offshoot, even as they privately hid and funded the Little Terrorists against the Big Terrorists of the U.S.
As the inevitable boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism hit Pakistan, the country’s bosses were forced to repeatedly turn to the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) for billions in economic aid—a total of fourteen times since the 1980s (Bloomberg, 7/26). In 2015, as the IMF began pressuring Pakistan to repay the loans and dictated harsher attacks on the working class and its standard of living, masses of workers fiercely fought back (CHALLENGE, 5/20/16).
U.S. decay paves way for China’s rise
Pakistan’s bosses have seen U.S. imperialism kill hundreds of thousands in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without anything resembling a U.S. victory. They are witnessing the turmoil under U.S. President Donald Trump, who tweeted: “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit….No more!” (1/1).
Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to fall behind on its loan repayments. Militant workers are demonstrating and striking for a better life. As Pakistan’s bosses began looking for an alternative, neighboring China saw an opening to weaken U.S. control over Pakistan and extend its own imperialist reach through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also known as One Belt, One Road.
New money, same old imperialism
In 2015, China announced the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $62 billion effort to modernize Pakistan’s infrastructure to serve China’s rising economy:
The project is branded around the theme of connectivity: power stations, ports, dams, transmission lines, roads and fibre optic cables linking Pakistan to the Chinese internet. Among projects to be completed in 2018 are a mass-transit light railway in Lahore, and a coal-fired power plant in Karachi (Guardian, 8/3).
In 2016, in return, Pakistan leased control of an entire city to China for over 40 years, the deep-water port of Gwadar. Over the next several years, new rail, road, gas, and oil pipeline networks will align Pakistan with major cities in western China, oil-rich Iran, the U.S.-dominated Middle East, and Africa.
Muhammad Zubair, governor of Sindh Province in Pakistan (including the commercial hub of Karachi and two gigantic seaports), is a close ally of Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister who was arrested on corruption charges 12 days before Khan’s contested election. He openly acknowledges that the Chinese relationship is about more than economics: “It gives China the security leverage they desperately need. Obviously they want to compete with America….They have global ambitions, and we have been their friends long before anyone else” (Guardian,8/3).
But all that glitters is not gold. Chinese imperialism may seem less ruthless at the moment than the U.S. variety, but a wolf is still a wolf. In Sri Lanka, after their $8 billion dollar investment in various port projects failed to turn a profit, Chinese banks forced the island country into a 99-year lease on the port in Hambantota, with 70 percent ownership going to China (New York Times, 6/25).
This is classic imperialism in action, and U.S. bosses are worried. They are stipulating that any future IMF loans cannot  be used to pay off Pakistan’s debt to China. The inter-imperialist rivalry in Pakistan exposes how big powers use “legal” banking institutions to keep nations impoverished and strong-arm them to do their bidding.
With U.S. imperialism in decline and China accelerating its challenge, the storm clouds of global war are fast approaching. The various rulers know they need to win workers to nationalist ideas to fight that war. But the international working class cannot be fooled by nationalist rhetoric. Whether it takes the form of liberal democracy, state capitalism, or openly fascist authoritarianism, all forms of capitalism are dictatorships of the bosses. All of them exploit workers’ labor. All of them will slaughter millions to protect their profits. With the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party, workers must organize and unite to create a new society that serves the needs of our class.
As PL’ers in Pakistan recently declared: “Our local struggles have an impact on workers all over the world. Only international communist revolution under our international communist party can free the working class from the daily miseries of capitalism. Join us!”