Karachi’s toughest cop takes on Taliban

For Karachi’s toughest policeman, fighting the Taliban had always been strictly business, the latest job in a 25-year career spent sweeping mobsters, hitmen and assorted low-life from the city streets. Then, a man rammed a pick-up truck laden with 500kg of explosives into his home as his children were getting ready for school. The vendetta had started.
The blast killed eight people but left Muhammad Aslam Khan’s family miraculously unscathed. Emerging from the wreckage of his house, the furious detective pledged to bury the culprits in the crater left by the blast.
Seven months on, Mr Khan, the head of Karachi’s “Anti-Extremist Cell”, believes he can stop militants from sowing more chaos in Pakistan’s commercial capital – provided they do not stop him first.
Holed up one night in his fortified office, chain smoking as his officers waited for tip-offs from informants, Mr Khan slapped a file on his desk. The dossier summarised the latest intelligence on plots to kill him.
It was 115 pages long.
“This is my shroud,” Mr Khan said, gesturing at his trademark white shalwar kameez – the outfit favoured by many Pakistani men. Then he chuckled, and lit another cigarette.
Pakistan’s war on extremists constantly shifts shape. The army has waged offensives in the badlands on the Afghan border; US drones loiter in search of prey; and spies shadow the jihadist groups they once nurtured.
Mr Khan’s crusade affords a glimpse into a less-publicised dimension of the struggle, one that looks more like law enforcement, albeit against a deadlier foe than the hired-guns and racketeers he jailed in the past.
The phrase “hard-boiled” hardly does Mr Khan’s reputation justice.
Counting on his fingers, the senior superintendent recalls being shot four times over the years, or was it five? Toting a Glock pistol but shunning body armour, he supervises raids in person. His team has netted 150 Taliban suspects, he says, and disrupted many attacks. “We’ve put a big dent in them,” he said. “That’s the main reason that they’re after me.”
A city of 18m people, Karachi had been regarded as a place where militants would come to hatch plots, raise money or disappear. Periodic outbreaks of violence in the city have traditionally been driven by turf wars between political parties, in which hundreds have died.
In the past 18 months, insurgents have upped the ante. The number of bombings in Sindh – which police say are largely conducted by Taliban-affiliated groups – hit a peak of 54 last year compared with 15 in 2008.
Some have rivalled the ambitious raids that have stunned other Pakistani cities. In November 2010, militants partially razed a building housing police investigators, killing 16. In May last year, a Taliban squad laid siege to a supposedly high security Naval base. (One of Mr Khan’s agents boasts that he shot dead two of the attackers during the shoot-out.) A few weeks ago, a suicide bomber tried to assassinate a senior police officer travelling in a convoy, killing four.
Mr Khan seems almost more aggrieved by the attitude shown by his neighbours, who organised a petition to try to force him to move after the attack on his house in September. He is fighting them in court, but ruefully admits that schools are afraid to enrol his children.
His list of enemies hardly needed padding. Over years spent hounding the Karachi underworld, Mr Khan has antagonised such an impressive roster of crime overlords, street gangs and thuggish party bosses that some say it is a marvel that he has survived this long.
No stranger to controversy, Mr Khan once spent 18 months in jail after being accused of murdering a suspect. He was acquitted, but the case was a reminder that Pakistan’s police have acquired a reputation for conducting extra-judicial killings – sometimes out of frustration with a broken down court system swayed by threats and bribes.
Mr Khan faced a barrage of public anger this month for launching an operation to drive gangsters from the Lyari neighbourhood that turned the densely populated district into a war zone. Police backed by armoured vehicles struggled to advance during the week-long battle as criminals hit back with machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Five officers and 26 civilians were killed, including one woman and a seven-year-old boy. But there was no evidence that Mr Khan had struck a decisive blow against the kingpins.
Mr Khan believes critics should remember the successes of his 175-man force. The pace of bombings in Karachi has slowed, he says. They have even caught five men accused of scouting his house before the blast.
But whether cowed, or simply lying low, it seems certain that the militants still have him in their sights. “Of all my enemies, the Taliban are the most fearsome,” he said. “I’m not going to spare them.”