Primarily it is the same importance that it holds for the Zardaris, the Sharifs, and the rest of our “Elite” i.e Pakistan is a country they can all rob. This is much as was the case with India, when the Mir Jaffers and Sadiqs and the British were similarly arrayed on the same side against the interests of India.
To be sure, the additional driver in case of the U.S is the geostrategic advantage that having Pakistan as a client state can provide; and also the denial of this geostrategic space to its adversaries. But essentially it is greed that drives colonizers to colonize other countries and build empires. And traitors from within the colony help the process forward. In no case was this done more successfully and seamlessly than in the case of India. And that same old DNA is still living and thriving in most of us.
Therefore, as empires are built, some countries become extremely rich and powerful, and those from which the wealth is scraped are left impoverished and made powerless.
Every country begins with ensuring its security. But having achieved this basic security, this same “security impulse”, by over extension, morphs into the compulsion to dominate and rule other countries in order to rob them of their resources. Then more colonies are made and resources usurped, till the “lead” country achieves domination which may not be challenged by any other country.
It was the plunder of its colonies by Britain which provided it the capital to bring about the Industrial Revolution, which also funded the further extension of its colonial empire, till it became an unchallenged power.
But there is another driving force within the colonizing states which feeds the need to colonize other states. And that is the oligarchic formation in these colonizing countries and what these oligarchs do to such societies.
Oligarchies are constantly being made in all societies by ruthless accumulation of the assets of such societies by a few at the cost of rest of the society. This happens because societies have “fixed” i.e limited resources, to acquire which their whole population is in competition. The few who emerge as winners are the oligarchs, and the losers are the “masses”. Massive wealth accumulation needs the helping hand of crime, without which a rich man may be created, but an oligarch cannot. To create one oligarch therefore, it is a mathematical essential that millions must be impoverished. This is why Zakat is decreed, and the thieving hand is to be lopped off! So when you see a Zardari or a Nawaz Sharif or a Malik Riaz, and then you cast your eye on Pakistan’s tattered and unwashed millions, the inter-connection between the two should become immediately clear.
The second function which colonization performs, is to make up for the resources which the oligarchs in a society have robbed from the common man in that society, and created poverty which cannot be sustained. These poor masses have be fed and housed if revolutions are to be averted. And they are fed and housed by resources robbed from the colonies.
In short, the additional function of colonization is to rob the poor of a third country, in order to feed your own poor, who have been impoverished by the theft of your own oligarchs!
But after World War Two, colonization has changed shape. Physical occupation of colonies to extract their wealth is no longer in fashion because it is no longer practicable. What has taken its place is financial colonization. In this system finance is deployed as a weapon against the host country to give monopolistic control of its resources to foreign finance and oligarchs.
This is achieved by free movement of finance capital to and from the target countries.
This is the neo liberal system which is centered around free markets. And the meaning of “free market” in this context is that the markets of colonies are made open and “free” for oligarchs from colonizing countries to plunder without hinderance.
This neo liberal commitment to “free markets” is least “economic” in nature. But it is deeply grounded in ideology which accords validity to the raiding of assets of the colony, which is facilitated through “free” trade. And fundamental to this free trade is that the colony is compelled to privatize its public assets, because public assets are not as easy to raid and take over, as the private ones may be.
So deeply is this principle of “freedom to raid” embedded in neo liberalism, that countries which erect barriers against this “freedom” are considered “enemy” countries.
A very good example of this is the current animus of the neo liberal West against Russia. Till the perpetually drunken Yeltsin was ruling Russia, with Russian resources open to plunder by western corporations and individuals, everything was fine. But the moment Putin came in and erected barriers against this plunder, he became the prime bogey man for the West, so much so that conditions were created for the Ukraine War to break out, the ultimate purpose of which is regime change in Russia!
The three great tools of this weaponized foreign finance are the World Bank the IMF and the oligarchs within the colony. What has happened in the case of Pakistan should be very easy to understand. Our governments, one after another, have lived beyond their means i.e robbed beyond what their country could bear. And having robbed the funds allocated to run the country, they have repeatedly gone to the IMF to make up the shortfall in order to run the country, perpetually increasing Pakistan’s debt!
Therefore, Pakistan today is a slave to the IMF; the thieves are free and living it up in Hyde Park; the people are writhing in grinding poverty, while a smell of revolution hangs in the air. It should also become clear here that under the neo liberal dispensation, the oligarchs of the colonizing states, and those of the colony, work in tandem to loot the colony. The former arrange for the protection of the latter and both exercise considerable control over their respective governments.
“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains,” declaimed Marx and Engels. But the workers did not heed their call. And while no one gave a call for the Oligarchs of the world to unite, yet they have done so instinctively from time immemorial as if an unending mating season was on!
It is therefore not for nothing that all such sages, philosophers, and political thinkers through the ages, as have commented upon oligarchic formation, have uniformly condemned it. And they have condemned it because whenever the interest of the state is at variance with that of the oligarch, the latter will subvert the interest of his state in favour of his own.
But Pakistanis always believed they had a defense against being thus subverted. And this defense was their Army and their faith in it. Indeed, each time the Army moved in and took charge, it cited “corruption” as its main reason for doing so. But NEVER once did it move against corruption, and yet this did not give pause to our hopes and wake us up from our dreams. We just went on believing.
Indeed, it is just recently that it has finally become clear to us that the Zardaris and Sharifs and their ilk have been under the Army’s protection all along, at the behest of a foreign power. Our faith in the army turned out to be little more than a conceit born of lazy hope. Very few realized that traditionally all armies are the last line of defense of the Oligarchs against the people. We did not stop to think why it should have been the opposite in our case!
Our heartbreak would not have been so crushing had we read, and thought over, what Gen Smedley Butler [twice Medal of Honour winner] said in his famous 1935 “War Is a Racket” speech:
” During my 34 years of service I spent most of this time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. I suspected I was a part of a racket at that time, now I am sure of it. “
Perhaps this piece would be best concluded by quoting Plato on oligarchy:
” An Oligarchy becomes two cities, the Rich and Poor, as great wealth is opposed to the masses, and almost everyone outside the ruling class is a pauper.”