11 May 2013
Celebrations of today’s Pakistani elections to the National Assembly and four provincial assemblies are a political fraud, intended to lend a veneer of “democracy” to a neocolonial regime that is presiding over a society in a state of economic and political collapse.
The elections take place as Pakistan sinks deeper into financial crisis and civil war, driven by the government’s support for the Obama administration’s escalation of the Afghan war into Pakistan. Since the beginning of April, over 100 people have been killed, including several election candidates, by forces allied with the Afghan Taliban who are resisting the US-led occupation of Afghanistan.
The election will be overseen by hundreds of thousands of security personnel, including tens of thousands of army troops. In Punjab province alone, 300,000 security personnel, including 30,000 army troops, have been deployed.
The votes cast by Pakistan’s workers and oppressed masses will have no influence on the key economic or military decisions affecting them. The basic framework of state policy has been agreed by the army and the political elites, on the instructions of the Obama administration and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The current caretaker government has already negotiated the framework of a new International Monetary Fund emergency package of austerity measures.
The media has rejoiced that the outgoing Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)-led government completed its five-year term, the first time a civilian government has served its full term in the history of a country ruled by US-backed military dictatorships for half of the period since formal independence in 1947. The PPP government survived, however, only by uniting with the army in imposing widely hated policies dictated by Washington. It left its security policy to the army and the Pentagon and implemented austerity policies formulated by the IMF.
The PPP, the Pakistani bourgeoisie’s traditional “left” party of rule, not only continued military dictator Pervez Musharraf’s support for the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, but extended it into a war on its own people. The PPP and the Pakistani army have acquiesced to illegal CIA drone strikes that have terrorised large parts of the country and killed thousands, including unknown numbers of women and children. They have also sent troops into Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan to crush Taliban resistance, displacing millions of Pakistani
This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site