All signs indicate that the coastal city has been invaded by the Taliban By Ammar Shahbazi.
Karachi: The red has been bled out of Sohrab Goth and Saeedabad. Once these areas were citadels of the Awami National Party in Karachi: crimson ANP flags dominated the skyline and party offices buzzed with activity. But a dramatic upsurge in violence and target killings over the course of 2012 has driven the ANP activists out of these Pakhtun-dominated areas.
And, the party still refuses to name names. “We don’t know who they are,” insists an ANP official.
But what about the police reports of the attackers being Taliban? “The word ‘Taliban’ means students; why would a group of students do this to us? This is either a coterie of petty thugs who’re looking for trouble or someone who, in the garb of the Taliban, is conspiring to obliterate the ANP from Karachi. But we won’t call them Taliban till the same is independently verified in a court of law.”
According to an ANP spokesperson, at least 1,200 of their activists have been ‘attacked’ in Karachi since the end of 2011. But he refuses to say how many were killed, whether by the Taliban or others. (The number cannot be independently verified but, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, there have been 264 politically-motivated target killings in the city in 2012.)
The speak-no-evil stance reflects the double bind the party is in, both physically and politically. From 2005 onwards, when militants started coming to Karachi, the areas they were naturally drawn to were Pashtun-dominated areas, which offered cultural and linguistic homogeneity.
Over time, the number of these ‘foreigners’ has increased dramatically and so, correspondingly, has their influence and sway over the areas they live in.
So, while sources within the party will admit that their political leadership in Sindh is under dire threat from “the Taliban, especially from members of the Mehsud tribe” and that the tribesmen are conducting “massive recruitment campaigns in the Pashtun areas of the city, both with carrots and sticks,” the fear of attacks and reprisals keeps the ANP mum.
Complicating this situation are the political considerations. The coastal city is witness to the longstanding vicious turf war between the ANP and the MQM. Referring to the “attackers” as Taliban will first rob the ANP of the option of accusing the MQM of political aggression and, perhaps more significantly, the MQM was the first party to speak of the impending “Talibanisation of Karachi” many years ago and has, in recent weeks, been crowing about it from the rooftops. By identifying the aggressors as the Taliban, the ANP will be conceding the veracity of what they had earlier dismissed as hysteria and, more dangerously, inviting a crackdown by law-enforcement agencies in what are primarily Pashtun-dominated neighbourhoods.
However, the MQM has no such compunctions. “Thousands of Taliban fled Waziristan and Swat in the wake of the army operations and their numbers on the outskirts of Karachi have been increasing for the last three to four years,” says Muhammed Aadil Khan, the party’s MPA from Gadap Town which lies on the north-western edge of the city and includes Pashtun strongholds such as Sohrab Goth, Mangophir, Gulshan-e-Maymar and Surjani Town.
“Since there isn’t any formal registration of these migrants, we have no records regarding their numbers. It’s all guess work.”
But the effects these unspecified number are having are far less amorphous.
- The tale of Manghopir
The rugged hill range of Manghopir, on the outskirts of Karachi, is home to one of the city’s oldest shrines and the Sheedis, an ethnic community which calls itself descendants of African settlers. Over time, the myths surrounding the Sufi saint buried there, the purportedly curative powers of the area’s springs, the crocodiles and the hash-scented annual urs and the Sheedi mela have fused to create a powerful cultural meme. Till now, that is.
According to locals, a few months ago residents of the Pashtun-dominated ghettos in the area — Kunwari Colony, Pakhtunabad and Sultanabad — were served with handbills warning them to keep their women at home. (There are also unverified reports of public flogging of some women for the offence of leaving home without a male escort.) And, the results were almost instantaneous.
“If you visit the Thursday bazaar near Sultanabad, you can see the effect the Taliban re having,” says a police official whose last posting was in that area but is too scared to talk on the record. “Till a few months ago, the bazaar was mainly frequented by women. Now the number of Pakhtun women visiting the bazaar has dropped by at least 50 per cent.”
Even non-governmental organisations working for the uplift of communities in the Taliban-dominated areas are feeling the heat. According to a report released by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the outreach for the polio immunisation campaign was the lowest in Gadap Town. “The target was to cover 95 per cent of the area… whereas, only 67 per cent was covered,” concluded the report.
“Rule number one is that you can’t work in these areas wearing jeans and T-shirts,” says Rana Asif, a child rights activist, who is plugged into the social services community of Karachi. “Be it a healthcare awareness programme or education, the outsiders are under a constant threat and it is getting tougher by the day. People are wrapping up their projects in the areas infiltrated by the Taliban.”
As in the pre-operation Swat, there is word about CD shop owners and barbershops in Manghopir having received threats. “We have lost Mangophir; it’s become Waziristan,” says Abdullah Baloch, an activist from the Sheedi community who was born and raised in the area. “We’ve been living here for centuries; my forefathers are buried here. But now, Mangophir has been overrun by outsiders and their law prevails.”
Baloch is an exception in Manghopir; no one else is willing to point a finger at the Taliban and certainly not on the record. “They keep their eye on each of us; I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re tapping our cell phones even,” drawls a cynical resident. “And when they decide [that we have committed an offence], they don’t talk. They just come and shoot.”
Area residents say at least two co-educational schools, run by Christian missionaries in the Manghopir area for decades, have been told by the Taliban to shut their doors. “We received a parchi [extortion slip] for a few hundred thousand rupees from the Taliban shortly before Eidul Azha and were warned about ‘consequences’ if we failed to pay,” admits an administration official at one of the schools. Panicked, the school administration decided to dismiss classes on the last Friday before Eidul Azha. “On the intervention of a local jirga, we have been ‘allowed’ to operate for now but the threat is still alive,” he says.
While the jirga is the saviour here, others are also raising questions about how long this benevolence will last. “When extremist forces turn powerful in a community, they begin to influence the jirgas, which ends up with them imposing their own laws,” says a longtime social activist, who has worked with Pakhtun communities in Karachi, especially on the issues pertaining to madrassah reform. “While this hasn’t happened on such a large scale in Karachi as yet, if [the militants] are intent on staking a long-term claim over the city, they will soon end up prevailing over the jirgas.”
- Spreading tentacles
The schools in Manghopir are just at the fringes of a massive fund mobilisation effort by the Taliban. In a broad swath cutting across Sohrab Goth, Baldia Town, Quaidabad, New Karachi Industrial Area, Manghopir, Surjani Town, SITE, Qasba Colony and Peerabad as well as other industrial areas, traders, entrepreneurs and businessmen are getting extortion slips worth millions of rupees. Significantly, however, no one is willing to talk about these parchis.
“Parchis are also being given to public buses and the cooperatives running across coaches in the city and the amounts are non-negotiable,” confides one W-21 bus operator, who introduced himself as Khan. “We paid Rs 3 million for the W-21 route weeks before Eidul Azha.”
- Endgame
“The reason the Taliban have never opened a war front in Karachi was because the city has simultaneously been a resting stop and a safe haven for them,” says leading defence analyst Ikram Sehgal. “But since the Pakistan Army’s been successful in its counterinsurgency efforts in Swat and Waziristan, the Taliban have decided to hit back by destabilising the city that generates most of the nation’s revenue.”
And complicit in these excesses, maintain most, is a flabby state. “These elements are flourishing because of the failure of the administration in enforcing its writ,” argues senior journalist Zahid Hussain. “If the Taliban manage to impose their way of life, it will always be in areas where the administration of the state is weak, that is, the outskirts of the city.” And the only way to counter this threat, he says, is by empowering the administration and imposing the writ of the government.
“In order to fight the Taliban in urban areas like Karachi, the government has to set up a dedicated counter terrorism force which cuts across all barriers and conducts a no-holds-barred campaign against these forces,” agrees Sehgal.
However, Hussain doesn’t set much stock by the doomsayers who’re predicting a city under Taliban siege. “While the threat [of Talibanisation] does exist, Karachi is an urban city with a completely different dynamic — it can never become a Swat or Waziristan,” he says.
