Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [191]
If these leaders really expected to be attacked, such negligence would be suicidal. It seemed to me, therefore, that rather than a war to the death, what was happening in Karachi in the first half of 2009 was a war of maneouvre, part of the Pakistani ‘negotiated state’ in which violence is part of the negotiations: always in the background, and sometimes in the foreground, but in which usually it is only a few pawns who get killed. The greatest risk of Taleban terrorism in Karachi is that it will provoke the MQM into counter-attacks which will then trigger an all-out struggle, in which the Taleban will replace the ANP as leaders of the local Pathans, and the MQM will use this Talebanization as an excuse to reduce the Pathans to a completely subordinate status. However, as an official of the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau (IB) told me,
The mood among the Pathans in Karachi is very different from the mid-1980s when all this started and there were huge riots with dozens or hundreds dead. Then, they believed all the old Pathan stuff about how they are the bravest and the toughest and Mohajir city-dwellers are cowards who won’t fight. But the MQM taught them different, and gave them a very bloody nose. Today, Pathan gunmen may clash with MQM gunmen, and pick off local MQM activists, but our analysis is that they’ll be very careful about joining the Taleban and starting a full-scale war with the Mohajirs, because they think they’d lose. And if they don’t start a war, then the MQM will also basically tolerate them – just push them back from certain places, teach them a lesson now and then. The MQM also don’t want all-out war that would wreck their city.
For a great strength of the MQM is that like the Jamaat, but unlike any other Pakistani party including the ANP, they do have a dream that goes beyond patronage for themselves and their supporters. Their weakness is that this dream is almost certainly unattainable.
The dream is of Karachi as a Muslim Singapore on the Arabian Sea: modern, clean, orderly and economically dynamic, ruled by a form of relatively mild and benevolent totalitarianism. And if Karachi were an independent island, the MQM and the people they represent would probably be both ruthless and able enough to achieve this dream. But of course Karachi is not an independent island. It is part of mainland Pakistan, and inextricably linked to the problems, and the peoples, of the rest of Pakistan. The danger is that the effort to maintain the MQM’s vision and rule in Karachi in the face of the Pathans and Sindhis will feed the ruthless and chauvinist sides of the organization until its positive sides are drowned in the resulting bloodshed.
INTERIOR SINDH
The extent to which Karachi differs from its immediate hinterland in Sindh is absolutely staggering, even in a region of stark social and ethnic contrasts like South Asia – just as, beyond the city limits, the mayor’s great motorway becomes the misnamed ‘superhighway’ between Karachi and Hyderabad, which is mostly a potholed two-lane country road. The bridge between these two worlds is the Sindhi wadero landowning class, tied to Karachi by its urban upper-class lifestyle and by the parliament and government of Sindh which waderos dominate, and which are situated in Karachi. I asked a Sindhi journalist to explain the difference between a wadero and a non-wadero landowner. The answer came down yet again to kinship and hereditary prestige:
A wadero has to have a lot of land, but he has to have other things as well. He has to be the leader of a tribe, or from a pir family, and here in Sindh the family has to be an old one if he wants real respect. He has to have gunmen and dacoits