Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [177]
That done, I turned on the television to see if anything important had happened during the day, and discovered that yes, it had – thirty-four people had been killed in gun battles and targeted shootings over the previous few hours in outlying parts of Karachi; and no one whom I’d met in the centre of town had thought it worth mentioning, or had changed their behaviour in any way as a result.
What was even more striking was that this experience echoed one of almost twenty years before, when I was visiting Karachi as a journalist in August 1989. Then, too, a gun battle erupted in another part of town, of which I and everyone I met were unaware until I was tipped off by a local journalist. On that occasion, if I remember rightly, there were only six dead.
The fighting then was between fighters from the Mohajir majority in Karachi and others from the Sindhi minority in the city (but majority in the province as a whole). In 2009, the fighting was between Mohajirs and Pathans. Otherwise, at first sight, plus ça change . . . Nothing about the Rangers (a paramilitary corps under the army, acting as a reserve force of order in the city) trying to separate the two sides had changed, nor the alert, tense, rather contemptuous glances they cast over the local population from behind the light machine-guns mounted on their jeeps. Nor had anything at all changed in the handful of mostly ill-equipped and dirty hospitals to which the wounded were ferried. There have been several more such battles in 2009 and 2010.
All this is a long way of saying that Karachi is a deeply divided city, but also a very big city, with a remarkable capacity to tolerate episodes of great violence. In 1989 the population was already 8 million, bigger than London’s. By 2009, it had swelled to a megalopolis of around 18 million – or at least that was the estimate Karachi’s mayor gave me and uses as a basis. Other opinions from officials ranged from 15 to 20 million. Obviously, a city which is not sure of the existence of several million people isn’t going to miss thirty-four very badly; and indeed, visiting the affected areas in the following days, it was not easy to spot the occasional burntout shop and minibus amid the thousands of shops and minibuses still plying their trade on the endless streets.
Nor is Karachi a particularly violent city by world standards. Even if political and ethnic violence are included, the murder rate in Karachi at the last count put it twenty-fifth among the great cities of the world. Remove these elements, and the rate goes down to well below that of several large cities in the US. Despite the killings of April 2009, Karachi is still – God willing – much more peaceful than it was when I knew it in the late 1980s. As of 2010, killings are chiefly targeted, aimed at the activists and ‘hard men’ on either side; the killings are part of the political game, of the ‘negotiated state’. Then, there were mass killings, with bomb attacks and pillion riders on motorbikes firing Kalashnikovs into crowds, leaving dozens dead at a time, and pointing towards outright ethnic civil war. This improvement in the country’s greatest city has to be set against the growing violence of the Pathan areas of northern Pakistan. As usual, Pakistan is stumbling along, worse in some ways, better in others.
For that matter, even in its worst years Karachi was very far from the anarchy of West Africa, let alone Somalia or the Congo. Indeed, anyone who has done no more than visit Karachi airport can tell the difference. Since 2000, under two generally honest, efficient and dynamic city governments, the city’s infrastructure has considerably improved. All the same, there have been moments in Karachi when I was tempted to kiss the Rangers (a temptation strongly to be resisted).
Finally, it is worth noting that none of the major outbreaks of conflict in Karachi over the past generation has involved the Taleban, or Islamist extremism in general. There have been isolated terrorist attacks by Sunni