Who boosted the Taliban?
The Taliban’s take-over of the scenic Swat valley in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province is a damning indictment of over six decades of military and “civilian” bourgeois rule in Pakistan. Pakistan’s “revolving door” of government, with military dictators and corrupt politicians taking turns at creaming off central resources and accumulating wealth, has left a vast proportion of the country mired in poverty, illiteracy and without access to basic amenities like sanitation, clean water and electricity. Where the state has abjectly failed, various shades of Islamist fundamentalists like the...