Enemy Past The Gates

By Amir Zia

The News

November 6, 2012

Terrorist groups like the Taliban thrive on anarchy and disorder. Karachi’s fractured and highly polarised economic, social, ethnic and political environment makes it an ideal choice for all kinds of radicals and militants who want to confront and topple the existing order.

 

All of a sudden some of the high and mighty of this country seem to have woken up to the fact that Taliban insurgents have gained a foothold in Karachi. These religious zealots are resorting to bank robberies, kidnappings and extortion to raise funds for the so-called holy war that has consumed nearly 40,000 Pakistani lives since early 2002. Apart from operating crime rackets, the Taliban are also carrying out systematic assassinations of political rivals in Karachi’s Pakhtun-dominated neighbourhoods, where they have established control by ousting the nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) workers. A network of seminaries, mainstream religious parties, and new and old Islamic charities provide the militants a platform from where they penetrate, organise and entrench themselves in the city.

Therefore, the honourable Supreme Court – during a suo-motu hearing last week on the law and order crisis in Karachi – ordered action against the Taliban. The same week, President Asif Ali Zardari also asked authorities to present a report on the Taliban’s activities, while Interior Minister Rehman Malik informed the nation that Pakistan’s financial and industrial capital has transformed into a hub of these religious militants. 

On its part, the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) added the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) to its ever-expanding list of declared enemies. A TTP spokesman vowed that the Taliban would target MQM workers as a “religious obligation.” In his statement, he also encouraged the small Baloch and Sindhi militant bands to continue their struggle – in an apparent bid to find new allies and fuel ethnic, political and sectarian violence in Karachi, where more than 1,900 people have been killed so far this year. With the master of orchestrating suicide bombings and terror assaults formally announcing to join the fray in Karachi by throwing the gauntlet to the MQM, this means graver times lie ahead for the city.

Terrorist groups like the Taliban thrive on anarchy and disorder. Karachi’s fractured and highly polarised economic, social, ethnic and political environment makes it an ideal choice for all kinds of radicals and militants who want to confront and topple the existing order.

Although the Taliban presence in Karachi hit the headlines only in recent days, they have been expanding their network in the city for the past several years. The process gained momentum with the increased influx of the Pakhtun population to Karachi following the military operation in Swat and South Waziristan in 2009, and an escalation in US drone strikes on the militant-infested North Waziristan region. The majority of the refugees were ordinary citizens trying to escape the conflict, but a large number of militants also managed to find a safe-haven in the vast urban jungle of Karachi during this period.

The TTP’s hostility towards the MQM is understandable, since MQM leader Altaf Hussain and his supporters were the first to raise an alarm over increasing Talibanisation and the misuse of seminaries by extremist religious forces in the city.

However, the MQM’s early warning shots were largely ignored by friends and foes alike. Forces like the ANP saw it as a tactic by the MQM to protest against the continued influx of Pakhtuns in the megalopolis, while the concerned government officials and state institutions remained in a state of self-denial by design or default. The PPP – MQM’s senior partner in the ruling coalition – also failed to grasp the gravity of the situation as all the mainstream forces remained locked in self-defeating turf-wars and infighting at the cost of vital issues. The lack of focus and absence of any broad counter-terrorism strategy for the city allowed Al-Qaeda-inspired militants to rest, regroup, expand and carry out their activities – almost with impunity – in Karachi.

The MQM also emerged as the strongest and most vocal critic of the Taliban and their mindset following the assassination bid on Malala Yousafzai, in which she and two of her friends were wounded. In contrast to the other mainstream political parties, the MQM challenged the orthodox militia by trying to come up with an ideological counter-narrative, underlining the vision of Pakistan’s founding father, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who stood for a modern, progressive and secular state fused with the best traditions of Islam. While doing this, the MQM tried to mobilise people at different levels – especially the intelligentsia and the educated urban middle and upper-middle classes. The MQM’s plan to hold a referendum on November 8 to ask the people to decide whether they want Quaid-e-Azam’s Pakistan or the Taliban’s – is a positive initiative to mobilise public opinion against religious extremism and intolerance.

However, the MQM – with all its support in urban Sindh, a well-oiled organisational structure, die-hard workers and muscle power – is hardly in a position to take on the terrorist threat of the Taliban. In fact no political party can match the Taliban and its other Al-Qaeda-inspired allies on their turf of terrorism and suicide missions. A party the size of the MQM remains a soft target for the extremists, who already have a history of targeting the two other partners of the present ruling coalition – the ANP and the PPP – and depriving them of their some top leaders and scores of workers. Now the religious militia has added a new and dangerous element to Karachi’s ethnic and political minefield with their pledge to target the MQM. Dealing with the Taliban’s terror threat remains the sole responsibility of the country’s security forces, which too have remained the prime target of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda insurgents.

The Taliban challenge in Karachi should push the mainstream political parties to shun their petty differences and unite on the minimum agenda of fighting religious extremism in all its forms and manifestations. Any such consensus remains a must to mobilise public opinion against the Taliban and other non-state actors. It will isolate Taliban apologists like Imran Khan, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and various factions of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and allow the security forces to move against militants decisively on the back of popular support.

The PPP, the MQM, the ANP and other mainstream democratic forces – despite their differences and clash of interests – have a lot more in common when it comes to their politics and ideology. They cannot defeat terrorism alone, and need to join hands and unite the people if they want Pakistan to keep up with the 21st century world. The civil leadership must rise to the challenge in this battle of ideas without which the real conflict can never be won by the security forces in the short to mid-term.

In the long-term, both civilian and military leaders must focus on rehabilitating the foot-soldiers of these militant groups and focus on reforming seminaries, and providing modern education and economic opportunities to poor students. Karachi can be a game-changer in this conflict, but the window of opportunity in the election year might be very small.

All we need is a little common sense, a clear vision and some sincerity on the part of the politicians and military leaders to save Pakistan, which is teetering towards complete anarchy and chaos. Although the past offers little hope, rational thinking and sane decisions remain our only bet. Do we have any other choice? It is a matter of life and death now.

The Damned City

By Amir Zia
The News on Sunday

November 4, 2012

 

Today’s Karachi seems to rest on a keg of gunpowder, ready to explode. It is not a question of ifs and buts.

 

Who controls Karachi? 

The elected government and the state institutions or the political-cum-criminal mafias, killers, extortionists, land grabbers and street criminals.

 

Ask any ordinary citizen of this restive port city of Pakistan and you will probably hear that it is the law of the jungle in all its proverbial sense. Each state or non-state player has a small or large slice of turf of the city or a particular domain — depending on its power — and calls the shots not by the book but through force, intimidation or the barrel of the gun.
 

From the so-called elite to the common man, each and every one feels insecure and professes a sense of hopelessness about the present and the future of the country’s financial and commercial hub, which has transformed into one of the most dangerous mega-cities of the world.
 

The killers strike at will and remain at large in majority of the cases to return another day. The death toll in the city’s ethnic, religious and politically-motivated violence, gang wars and the blind murder category this year now hovers at around 1,900 and there are still nearly two months to go before 2012 ends. In 2011, there were 1,924 such deaths. The killings in Karachi since January 1, 2011 to date are more than 300 times higher than deaths caused by the US drone attacks on al-Qaeda and the Taliban militants on the country’s uncontrolled northern frontier.
 

The figure of the multi-billion racket of extortion is now anybody’s guess. On October 23, the Supreme Court of Pakistan in its hearing of the suo motu case on Karachi’s law and order crisis pointed out that no trader or industrialist can do business in the city without paying protection money. No wonder businesses and industries are shifting abroad and those still operating here are threatening a shutter-down as a protest against government’s continued inaction and indifference to their plight.

The broad daylight robberies and the looting of individuals at gunpoint no longer grab the media attention even. Crime statistics and figures have become irrelevant. In most cases, victims do not even lodge a police complaint — a fact recently admitted by the Chief Minister Sindh Syed Qaim Ali Shah. The victims know that nothing will come out of their complaints as police discourage them from registering the first investigation report in an attempt to keep the crime figure low — at least on paper. People just move on with their lives, hoping not to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Land grabbing also remains one of the most lucrative ventures for those who have muscle, weapons and the right political connections under the current political dispensation. Entire neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city are now no-go areas for the security personnel where armed-to-teeth militants belonging to this or that ethnic, religious or political group hold sway.

Ethnic, sectarian, political polarisation and turf wars keep Karachi’s pot on the boil all the time, and after regular intervals there is a mega-spike in the incidents of violence and lawlessness which, as a matter of routine, is followed by reassuring statements by the top government officials — from the president to interior minister — but nothing changes on the ground.

Yes, today’s Karachi seems to rest on a keg of gunpowder, ready to explode. It is not a question of ifs and buts. The situation is known to all, but those in power are not ready to acknowledge its gravity.

The thought and action required to stem the tide of lawlessness is missing.

It was on October 6, 2011 when the Supreme Court issued a detailed judgment on Karachi’s lawlessness and violence, directing the authorities to move against the illegal trade of weapons and mafias involved in various crimes. More than 12 months down the road the city’s crisis has only aggravated, forcing a five-member bench of the Supreme Court to again highlight the government’s inaction and indifference in dealing with the situation in one of the recent hearing of its 2011 suo motu case on Karachi.

But is anyone in the corridors of power paying any heed to the Supreme Court’s concerns and directives, which reflect the sentiments of the people of this traumatised city? Definitely not! “The judgments of the courts are systematically nullified as not a single accused has been executed in the last four-and-a-half years,” said Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali, during the October 24 hearing. The Supreme Court underlined that more than 3,000 convicts had been given death penalty for murder and terrorism, but not a single one executed by the authorities.

The irony is that while the Supreme Court has been forced to take a suo motu action on the continuing tragedy of Karachi, the government officials and elected representatives of the ruling coalition fail to give any hope to the city as on the ground, the state writ continues to recede.

The ruling coalition comprising the PPP, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and other smaller parties — some of which have recently parted ways over the new local body system in Sindh — inherited a relatively peaceful city when it came to power after 2008 elections. Barring a spike in violence in 2007 in Karachi in which 540 people were killed (the highest during Pervez Musharraf rule), the former military-led government managed to keep both killings and general crime relatively under control. Yes, al-Qaeda inspired terrorist attacks did occur at routine interval, but the political-cum-criminal mafias were kept under check — which might appear as a politically incorrect statement in this day and age of democracy. There were less crime and criminals on the road. The same police ensured that the feudal and tribal politicians, clerics, the urban elected representatives and officials move on Karachi roads without their fearsome guards openly displaying weapons and terrorising citizens.

The situation reversed with the PPP-led government in power. The workers of the PPP, the MQM and the Awami National Party (ANP) — all partners in the ruling coalition –got locked in a bloody turf war as new and much more ruthless players tried to glean their pound of flesh from the city by grabbing land and running street crime, drugs and weapons mafias and the extortion rackets. For the first time, traders, shopkeepers, businesspeople and industrialists were left with no choice but to hold shutter-down strikes as they got an introduction to the Peoples’ Aman Committee and the criminal gangs operating under the banner of the ANP. The MQM, credited for introducing organised money extortion racket way back in the late 1980s and 1990s, got tough rivals.

While today the MQM is trying to distance itself from the criminals operating in its ranks and is in the forefront of the demand to put an end to the extortion racket, the new forces have gone all out to secure and expand their turfs. The result is the wave of tit-for-tat killings among the mainstream groups and it has continued since early 2008.

Although the top leaders of these parties — President Asif Ali Zardari and the MQM leader Altaf Hussain — have managed to keep their uneasy alliance intact, they failed to fully translate their vision among their zealots, who have remained at loggerheads for most of the period.

But the presence of criminals within the ranks of mainstream political parties is only one aspect of the problem. The banned sectarian and religious militant groups are also contributing to Karachi’s bloodletting. The influx of local immigrants from the country’s troubled tribal region has resulted into strengthening of the Taliban network and al-Qaeda sympathisers in Karachi, which offers a nightmarish scenario for the police and the security agencies. The Taliban and al-Qaeda-inspired terror cells are not just to blame for terrorism and planned assassinations, especially in the Pakhtoon-dominated neighbourhoods where they are mostly targeting the ANP activists, they are also raising funds through extortion, bank robberies and kidnapping for ransom.

Politics became criminalised and crime politicised in the city due to soft-peddling of the government and state institutions because of expediency, a desire to use one group against the other and a general lack of will. By design or default, it is the ruling coalition and the state institutions which are presiding over the present lawlessness of Karachi. It remains their collective sin.

All expectations that the ruling coalition — having more than two-third majority in the Sindh Assembly — would be effective in establishing the rule of the law have come to naught. As the country lurches towards the election year, the tidings appear ominous for Karachi as political players gear up to raise election funds and secure or expand their turfs. The relatively new element of the organised Taliban and the al-Qaeda inspired network is likely to make its presence felt more in the coming months as the Pakhtoon nationalist ANP has lost ground to the religious forces.

In the remaining months, till the next government comes into power, there is little chance that the incumbents would be able to take any new initiatives to ensure supremacy of law and do what they couldn’t do all through their term, including simple steps of ensuring proper investigations and speedy justice on all criminal cases and giving police and the security forces independence to act.

The state institutions also need to redefine their rules of engagement and stop pitching one group against the other or protecting “some of the militants’ assets.”

But, is bringing peace and eradicating crime and violence from Karachi on their agenda at all? Do we have any honest players, who can deliver? One can only hope against hope. As for now, Karachi appears unmanageable.