Friday, August 27, 2010

FLOODS: PAKISTAN BRACING FOR THE FALLOUT

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

    Intimations of mortality of an incumbent regime, especially a civilian government, are nothing new for Pakistan. But doomsday scenarios about the imminent demise of the not just the political system but also the State have never been peddled as furiously and with as much conviction as they are being today, over the internet, on TV channels and in newspaper columns. The catastrophic floods that have swept through Pakistan, drowning about a fifth of the country and displacing around 20 million people, have prompted analysts, commentators and a section of politicians to become almost hysterical in predicting the impending collapse of the 'system' (political, economic, social and administrative), and perhaps even a revolution in the country.

There is no denying that the floods constitute a massive shock to the system, one that the Pakistani state will find difficult to come out of. But the apocalyptic picture being portrayed by the anchorocracy (TV anchors, most of them with right-wing, Islamist proclivities, who have taken upon themselves to set the national agenda and pronounce and propound on everything without knowing much of anything) needs to taken with a pinch of salt, more so because much of the rhetoric is heavily political and aimed primarily at somehow or the other deposing the current ruling dispensation.

This is not to rule out the possibility of large scale civil unrest leading to a complete breakdown of state authority and ultimately unravelling the Pakistani state. Even before the 'mother of all floods', Pakistan was in a very precarious state. The 'phony' War on Terror being fought by the Pakistan army – fighting local Taliban but at the same time providing support and sanctuary to Islamist fighters active in Afghanistan – had split the country down the middle. The spate of terrorist attacks in the Pakistan's heartland had demoralised the public. The tide of extremism and fanaticism showed no sign of ebbing, in large part because of the ambivalent stand of the Pakistani state on the issue of radical Islam.

The politics of the country was in a complete mess. Governance was practically non-existent as the government lurched from one political crisis to another. The army had once again started calling the shots on all issues pertaining to national security. Balochistan was once again in the throes of an insurgency. Restiveness was growing in Sindh. Law and order was breaking down all over the country. The country's commercial capital, Karachi, had steadily been descending into chaos with target killings and political turf battles becoming the order of the day.

Add to all this, the dismal state of the economy. Economic distress levels have risen to almost the breaking point in Pakistan, what with little or no new job creation (in fact job losses with hundreds of manufacturing units having closed down in the last couple of years), very poor investment climate, high inflation, a practically non-existent social goods sector (education, public health services etc.), a deeply indebted economy, low growth rates, unaffordable energy tariffs coupled with widespread energy shortages which are impacting on the already anaemic manufacturing sector.

It was against this backdrop that the floods hit Pakistan. Notwithstanding the proclivity of Pakistani officialdom to exaggerate the damage caused by the floods and profit from even a calamity, the fact is that the scale of devastation is colossal. Hundreds of thousands of houses and farmlands have been destroyed, hundreds of villages and tens of towns drowned, standing crops worth millions of dollars ruined, businesses and assets (farm implements, livestock, grain stocks etc.) washed away, scores of bridges destroyed, hundreds of miles of road and rail damaged beyond repair, power plants and refineries deluged, canals and dykes damaged. In short, the floods have pushed Pakistan back a decade or more.

The ripple effect of all this damage has already started being felt by rest of the Pakistani economy. It is estimated that economy will post a 0% growth this fiscal. While some international assistance will certainly be made available to Pakistan to rehabilitate the millions of flood victims, it is unlikely that Pakistan will get the 'Marshal Plan' it has been hankering for. Quite asides the fact that the Marshal Plan worked in a setting very different from Pakistan's, such a plan can never work in a country ruled by a kleptocracy – a venal political elite, an all powerful and unaccountable military, a dysfunctional administrative machinery, and a rapacious feudal mafia – which will siphon off a large chunk of this money.

Therefore, Pakistan will have to generate a bulk of the resources required for relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation from within the country. The most convenient way of doing this is by lopping off huge chunks off the development budget – so far no one has been brave enough to suggest a cut in the defence budget – and diverting these to flood relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction activities. In addition, the government is contemplating cutting the size of social security programmes and imposing new taxes to garner resources to fund the relief and rehabilitation work.

While additional taxation will impose a crushing burden on the miniscule Pakistani middle class that actually pays taxes – the rich in Pakistan enjoy a perpetual tax holiday – the cuts in social security programmes will add to the growing economic distress in the country. Adding further to the misery of the people will be the food, energy, fuel and raw material shortages, spiralling prices, all dovetailing on an economy already in a tailspin with no job opportunities for the youth and little or no hope for improving their lives. All in all, Pakistan confronts an explosive situation which it is feared could erupt anytime in the near and mid-term.

The Pakistani establishment is playing upon the fears being expressed within the country and without of the great tumult that could befall on it, and using this to extract as much money as possible from the international donors. But there is a real danger that the conjecture of revolution could turn into a reality, more so because cataclysmic changes are often precipitated by catastrophes like the floods. Even a functional and efficient state would find it difficult to provide succour to 10-15% of its population; to expect a moribund administrative machinery of an 'almost failed' state like Pakistan to look after such a huge population appears close to impossible.

Although the current PPP-led dispensation proved sceptics wrong and handled the crisis in Swat where military operations had displaced nearly 2-3 million people reasonably well and relatively efficiently, the flood crisis is about ten times greater in magnitude. Assuming that the Pakistan state fails to reach out to the affected people, there are broadly two scenarios that could play out once the flood waters recede. The best case and perhaps cynical scenario suggests that the Pakistani masses will not quite storm the Bastille just yet and the rotten state structure will continue to muddle along, albeit in a more weakened form. While the people affected by the floods will face enormous problems, they will be resilient enough to take the adversity in their stride. In any case, most of these people are what can be called the marginalised people of Pakistan whose voice or whose problems have never mattered to, much less cramped the style of, the Pakistani elite.

Pakistan's 'controlling authority' or the hub of the Pakistani establishment – central and north Punjab and Karachi – has escaped the ravages of the floods and is intact to control any unrest among the flood victims. As the wags put it, not a single game of golf in Islamabad club or Lahore Gymkhana has been called off because of the floods. If anything, members of the establishment and their compradors will not only retain control but also enrich themselves by grabbing new lands, partaking in the reconstruction contracts and skimming off the funds that a gullible West could pour into the country. The victims of the floods, who are inured to oppression and exploitation by the elite, will reconcile to their fate and fend for themselves.

While the best case scenario cannot be ruled out altogether, chances are that the other, more fearsome, scenario which holds the potential of unravelling the state could play itself out. At the very least, the spectre looms large of large scale civil unrest with desperate people taking desperate measures to stay alive, and in the process ripping apart whatever little remains of state authority. Propelling this outburst will be mishandling and mismanagement, not to mention misfeasance, of the relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction work.

Having lost practically everything, many of the landless will migrate to cities in search of livelihood. The impact of such large scale internal migration on an already fragile political situation in cities like Karachi, for example, will be enormous. In more stable cities, the influx of millions will create its own problems and social tensions. Meanwhile, there could be a huge law and order problem in rural areas where feuds over land will multiply exponentially, what with land records washed away, demarcation of lands having disappeared, and the rapacious land revenue officialdom waiting to extort money from hapless landholders to demarcate their lands. And even after the lands are settled there will be the issue of how to till these lands without livestock, farm implements, and the money to buy seeds, food, fodder etc.

Adding to the chaos will be Pakistan's other fault-lines which will get accentuated in the aftermath of the floods. The reservoir of resentment against the 'Raiwind-Rawalpindi belt', which is the heartland of the predominantly Punjabi establishment and has escaped the ravages of the floods, could spill over. Inter-provincial (between Punjab and the smaller provinces) and intra-provincial (between South Punjab and central and north Punjab) rivalries will gain salience with squabbles over the aid money. The apathetic attitude of the people unaffected by the floods towards the flood victims will also fuel resentment against the rich and privileged. The disaffection in Balochistan too is likely to grow, not just because of the discrimination in providing relief to the flood victims in that province, but also because of the devastation caused in the only two districts of Balochistan with a modicum of support for Pakistan – Jafarabad and Naseerabad – by flood waters which were diverted to these areas in order to save the Sindhi city Jacobabad and the Shahbaz airbase from where the CIA operates its drones. Therefore, the likelihood of chaos and anarchy breaking out all over the country is just too real to ignore.

In the event that this happens, the government will be forced to call in the army to restore order. The first casualty of any such move will be the civilian government. The army, which has been working overtime to project its relief and rescue efforts and pose as the ultimate saviour and protector of the people of the country, will takeover to control the situation. While such a step might give temporary relief by letting out some of the steam that has been building up in the system, the army's track record of governance is hardly anything to write home about. If anything, it will only worsen the political situation in the country, which will become more chaotic and uncontrollable, especially because while the army can wield the big stick, it is simply incapable of managing the conflicting and contradictory interests of the masses, something that only politicians are able to do.

While Pakistan has successfully managed to wave the Islamists-are-gaining threat at the West to force them to open their purse strings and pour aid into Pakistan, the fears of the fundamentalists exploiting the flood situation are somewhat overstated at this stage. Just as the massive aid being given by the Americans is unlikely to rehabilitate their image in Pakistan – those who detest the US will continue doing so even as they live off American money – the relief activities of the Islamists won't lead to an immediate shift of public support in their favour. In fact, a lot of the relief work being done by the charities of terrorist organisations is not in competition with the Pakistani state but with its concurrence. This much became clear when the Pakistanis orchestrated the visit of the USAID chief to a purported relief camp being either run by or manned by activists of the Falah-i-Insaniyat, a charity owned by the terrorist organisation Jamaatud Dawa, which is the holding company of the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The danger from the Islamist terrorist organisations is therefore not immediate. The real danger lies in the fact that if the state atrophies (as it very well could even if the army takes over) and civil unrest breaks out, the Islamists are best organised to harness this discontent and pose a challenge to the 'failing' state by filling the leadership vacuum. This will confront the army with a grave dilemma: it can either enter into a deal with its erstwhile clients and/or form a coalition with them, or else it can confront them and push the country into a civil war.

While this is the ultimate nightmare scenario for the world, it is precisely the trajectory that was being followed by the Pakistani state even before the floods. All that will happen after the floods is that this trajectory will gain greater traction. Ironically, this is something that will be the result not of any calamity but of a conscious policy of the Pakistan army and establishment to nurture Islamist terrorist groups as instruments of state policy. The floods are in this sense incidental to the future course of events in Pakistan and their role will be only to speed up the process of degradation of the Pakistani state.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

KILLING FIELDS OF KARACHI - II

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

Every time there is a spurt in the violence in Karachi, the Federal Interior Minister, Rehman Malik descends on the city to play peacemaker between the ANP and MQM. For a few days, all the killing comes to a sudden stop, and then the cycle repeats itself. After Raza Haider's assassination, a 10 point code of conduct has been agreed to by the MQM and ANP. That this is touted as a solution to target killings is a tacit acceptance of the political nature of the target killings. After all, if the killing of Raza Haider was the handiwork of what Malik has called the 'third force' and 'enemies of Pakistan' who want to destabilise the country – Rehman Malik has blamed the Sunni terrorist groups Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) – then clearly a code of conduct between MQM and ANP will not be of much help in ending the violence. The 'third force' theory also does not explain who was responsible for the bloodletting that followed Haider's assassination.

While there is no denying the strong presence of Islamist terror groups in Karachi, the city also has a thriving underworld that revels in the unsettled conditions that exist in Pakistan's commercial capital. Criminal syndicates involved in narcotics, gun-running, land-grabbing, protection, extortion, kidnapping and contract killing rackets have been operating in Karachi with relative impunity under political protection and patronage. The politicians rely upon the criminal syndicates to settle political scores and also raising funds for political activities. But it was not only politicians which benefited from the underworld; the Islamists too developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the criminal syndicates. The nexus of criminal syndicates with both politicians and Islamists was aided by the fact that most criminal gangs in the city were organised along ethnic lines, which allowed them to play a role in the politics of the city which too was polarised along ethnic lines.

In the 1980's and 90's, Karachi politics was primarily polarised between the ethnic Sindhis and Mohajirs. An attempt by the intelligence agencies to forge a Punjabi-Pashtun alliance – the Punjabi-Pashtun Ittehad – had run aground. The only force to pose some sort of a challenge to the MQM in Karachi was the religious parties. But in recent years, the Pashtuns have become a force to reckon with. Karachi is today not only the largest Urdu-speaking, Gangetic Plain Muslim city in the world, it is also the largest Pashtun city in the world. In the 2008 elections, the Pashtuns, under the ANP, won a couple of seats in the Sindh provincial assembly and are today part of the coalition government in Sindh. The massive influx of Pashtuns in Karachi has caused consternation among the MQM. For now, the MQM has managed to gerrymander the constituencies in a way that they dominate the elections. But this dominance is threatened by the rising number of Pashtuns in the city, especially in areas where the two communities live side by side.

Political considerations apart, the MQM is also deadly opposed to the growing presence of Taliban in the city, which they see not only as a political threat, but also as a threat to their way of life. Regardless of MQMs unsavoury reputation as a fascist party, the fact remains that it is the only middle-class political party in Pakistan and perhaps the party with the most modern, progressive, even secular, outlook in Pakistan. Unlike most other political parties which tend to take an ambivalent stand against the Islamists, the MQM has always taken a tough, uncompromising position against religious radicalism.

But the MQMs opposition to the talibanisation of the city was seen by the ANP as a thinly veiled attack on the growing Pashtun presence in the city. Although the ANP too has been in the vanguard of the fight against the Taliban, and has suffered far more at the hands of the Taliban than any other political party in Pakistan, in Karachi local political considerations have muddled ANP's politics. By positioning itself as the party representing Pashtuns in Karachi, the ANP might unwittingly be also batting in favour of the Taliban, many of whom are believed to have taken refuge in Pashtun dominated areas.

The fact that the police has busted many Taliban modules in Karachi and apprehended members of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan from Pashtun areas of the city lends credence to the MQM charge that the ANP is turning a blind eye to the growing talibanisation of Karachi only to appease its Pashtun vote bank. The tension between the MQM and ANP has been exacerbated by the rather provocative speeches and statements issued by the ANP leaders, both at the national level and the city level, against the MQM. Add to this the enrichment of some ANP city leaders from their links with the various mafias and the growing aggressiveness and assertiveness of the Pashtuns to stake their rights over the city by force of arms if necessary and the picture of the anarchic situation in Karachi is complete.

Caught in the middle of the political tussle and war of words (not to mention bullets) between the ANP and MQM is the PPP, which is trying to juggle various critical political objectives in Karachi. The PPP-led coalition government in Islamabad would be reduced to a minority without MQM support and therefore the PPP simply cannot afford to rub MQM the wrong way. At the same time, the PPP must keep on the right side of the ANP both because the ANP support is important in Islamabad as also because the ANP and PPP are in coalition in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Compounding the problem for the PPP is the deep animosity that its Sindhi vote bank has for the MQM. The more the PPP embraces the MQM, the greater the danger that it could alienate its Sindhi support base. Although the PPP has tried to balance its politics by stonewalling on the issue of local government legislation in Sindh in which the MQM has a vital stake, it has added to the angst in the MQM which feels that it is being denied its rightful political right to run Karachi. The MQM appears unwilling to allow any other political party a piece of the Karachi political pie by dividing the city in a way that other political parties will have a stake in Karachi politics.

Adding to an already complicated situation is the somewhat dubious role being played by the infamous intelligence agencies of the Pakistan, namely the ISI and MI. Quite aside the fact that many of the Islamist groups and criminal syndicate have deep links with the 'agencies' and are known to operate with the tacit blessings of the 'spooks', there are reports of involvement of intelligence personnel in target killings. Even in the past, there have been reports that the 'agencies' have been acting as agent provocateurs to fulfil some political agenda of the military top brass – destabilise the sitting government or remove inconvenient people from the scene with complete deniability. This time around too, there are good reasons to suspect the direct or indirect (through their Jihadist proxies) involvement of the 'agencies' in the target killings to destabilise the PPP government in Islamabad.

    Given the multiplicity of players involved, restoring some semblance of law and order in Karachi seems to be a rather tall task, way beyond the intellectual or administrative capacity of the civilian government. But it is unlikely if even the army will be able to handle the situation in Karachi, which is heading for a meltdown. Like the rest of Pakistan, Karachi too is now waiting tensely for that one spark that will conflagrate the whole place.

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    <1280 Words>                    12th August, 2010

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Friday, August 06, 2010

KILLING FIELDS OF KARACHI - I

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

    For months now, Karachi had been sitting on a powder keg, tensely waiting for that one spark that would blow up the city. But the bloodletting that has followed the assassination of a MQM legislator, Raza Haider, in which around 70 people have been shot dead, scores of shops and transport vehicles burnt down and all business activity has come to a grinding halt in a three day orgy of violence is probably not that spark. If the reports coming out of the city are anything to go by, worse is yet to come, what with political turf battles and ethnic animosities getting jumbled up with criminal syndicates, sectarian mafias and Islamic terror groups. Amidst the growing chaos in Pakistan's commercial capital, the almost dysfunctional state machinery is in a stasis induced in large measure by political compulsions. On their part, the politicians have been reduced playing the role of helpless bystanders doing nothing more than issuing statements of condemnation and declaring the resolve to clean up the city even as the spiral of violence shows no sign of winding down.

    Since the mid 1980s, Karachi has frequently suffered paroxysms of street violence. These bouts of violence were in large part the result of the political assertion by the majority Mohajir community under the leadership of the MQM. Not only did the MQM dominate the politics of Karachi, it also held complete sway over the streets of Karachi. Despite two quasi-military operations against the MQM, in which thousands of MQM cadres were brutally killed in thinly disguised extra-judicial 'encounters', the party held its own. After the Urdu-speaking Pervez Musharraf usurped power in 1999, the Pakistani establishment reached out to the MQM and accommodated it in the power structure in Karachi, Sindh and the Centre. From around 2002, the MQM was practically given a run of the place in both the provincial government as well as the city government. The pivotal position that the MQM held in the National Assembly ensured that no precipitate action could be taken against the party. This situation has prevailed even after the return of 'democracy' in 2008.

    With MQM back in the saddle, the violence in the city underwent a metamorphosis. Except for a show of force in May 2007 when the then dysfunctional Chief Justice had gone to Karachi to gather support against his suspension by Musharraf, large scale street disturbances and violence got replaced by the phenomenon of target killings. Initially, police officers involved in the 'encounters' of MQM cadres were shot down one by one. But soon the trend of target killings acquired a more sinister form. Political activists and workers and ordinary citizens have been gunned down practically on a daily basis for nearly two years now. It is believed that these targeted killings were the result of a political turf and aimed partly at making Karachi appear to be an unsafe place for certain ethnic groups (which in turn led to retaliatory killings of members from other ethnic groups) and partly a tactic to impose the writ of one or the other political party in the area where these killings are taking place. At the same time, there have also been targeted killings of people belonging to rival religious sects. For instance, over a 100 doctors, almost all of them Shias, were gunned down before the law enforcement agencies woke up to the sectarian nature of the target killings.

Karachi which had always been a hub for Islamists, witnessed in the 1980's and 90's a growth of jihadist mafias in the city. Radical madrassas had sprouted up all over the city and provided the underpinning for the flourishing jihad industry. Almost all the big jihadist outfits like Harkatul Mujahideen, Harkatul Jihad Islami, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba etc. had established their network in the city. Alongside, sectarian groups like the Sunni Deobandi extremist group, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), and its militant wing Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), and the Shia group Tehrik-e-Fiqh-e-Jafferia also drew support. Not to be left behind, the Barelvi sect set up its own outfit – Sunni Tehrik – to challenge the growing Deobandi influence, but suffered a huge setback after its entire top leadership was wiped out in a bomb attack in 2006 during a rally in Karachi's Nishtar park.

As a result, Karachi was quite a fertile ground for al Qaeda and the Taliban, not only in terms of providing recruits, but also for rest, recuperation, resources, and refuge, not to mention transit point for Jihad Inc, something that is borne out not only by the arrest of important al Qaeda members but also the arrest of the Taliban deputy head, Mullah Baradar. By the time the American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and killed in Karachi, the city had already become notorious for being a hub of jihadist militias, a sort of terror central in which terror cells and modules proliferated. Surprisingly, during the last few years, despite the presence of the Taliban / al Qaeda in the city, it turned out to be least affected by the sort of Islamic terrorism that was hitting upcountry Pakistan.

This was not so much because of effective law enforcement but more because the Islamists felt that anarchy in the city would undermine their strategy instead of promoting it. A wave of terror attacks in Karachi would have forced the hand of the government to put in place security mechanisms that would interfere in the relative free run that the Islamist terror groups were enjoying in the city. Of course, this did not stop the terror groups from indulging in low level violence – target killings and the occasional bomb attack (like the Ashura bombing in December last) – to keep the city tense and on the edge by aggravating the existing political, ethnic and religious fault-lines in the city, the idea clearly being to exploit the explosive situation at a time of their choosing.

Karachi is not just the life-line of Pakistan – with its two ports which handle the bulk of Pakistan's foreign trade – it is also the life-line of NATO forces in Afghanistan which also receive the bulk of their logistics supplies through Karachi. The Islamist terror groups, most of who are either allied to the Taliban / al Qaeda or are sympathetic to them, have long eyed the logistics supply lines of the NATO forces as a target in order to choke the NATO forces war fighting capabilities. While threats have been issued to transporters – almost the entire transport trade in Karachi is controlled by the Pashtuns – to not carry NATO supplies, no serious action has been taken against the NATO supply line so far.

But the possibility cannot be ruled out that at a time when the devastating floods in upcountry Pakistan have already disrupted NATO supply lines, the killing of the MQM legislator was part of an effort by the Islamist terror groups to bottle up the logistics operations in Karachi and worsen the situation for the international security forces in Afghanistan. Even if this was indeed the case, it would still appear that the time has still not come for the Islamists to shut down the city completely and all they have done so far is to demonstrate (or should we say test) their ability to sabotage the NATO supplies by instigating and orchestrating violence in Karachi.

(to be continued)

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    <1220 Words>                6th August, 2010

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