Drink tea with Hussein Hazari at his tiny shop in the city’s old quarter, and both statements feel true. Hazari is a neat, guarded man who sits with his constantly beeping BlackBerry amid shelves stacked with spray paint, car polish and adhesives. Recently Hazari began selling another product: gun lubricant. “I thought it was worth a try, because weapons are so readily available here,” he says. Time magazine report says that’s an understatement. More than a thousand people died last year in ethnic turf wars fueled by heavily armed supporters of Karachi’s main political parties, perishing in street battles fought with assault rifles, machine guns and grenades. Some victims were decapitated.
There could be a sequel. Despite the heavy presence of Rangers, there are fears the city is entering an even more dangerous era. This is worrying because what happens in Karachi has global implications. With a population of 18 million, it is the country’s largest city and commercial capital, providing at least half its tax revenues. “You cannot destroy Pakistan by destroying cities like Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar,” says Mustafa Syed Kamal, the city’s fast-talking former mayor. “You have to destabilise Karachi first, because it is Pakistan’s economic backbone, its oxygen provider.”
Internally, the country is dangerously divided. The ongoing “memogate” scandal has exposed tensions between the military and the weak government of President Asif Ali Zardari. The leak of the unsigned memo, in which Islamabad apparently asks for the Pentagon’s help to divert a feared military coup, forced the resignation of Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington and could ultimately topple Zardari himself.
Unsurprisingly, British author, academic and terrorism analyst Anatol Lieven calls Pakistan “perhaps the biggest and wobbliest domino on the world stage”. And the most dramatic symbol of that instability is Karachi. A recent surge in violence has sealed its reputation as life-threatening and unlivable. In November, global consulting firm Mercer ranked it 216th out of 221 cities in a personal-safety survey that took into account not just sectarian and ethnic unrest, but also terrorist attacks.
Take away political violence, and Karachi is still plagued by the common variety — armed robbery, kidnappings for ransom, murder — with only 30,000 underpaid police to tackle it all. And the city is still afflicted by the problems of a fast-growing metropolis: pollution, bad sanitation, slums and a transport system so overburdened that thousands of Karachiites commute to work on bus roofs.
Chronic power shortages routinely plunge the City of Lights (as it was known in a bygone era) into darkness. In September, monsoon rains caused floods that brought the city to a halt. “It is perhaps Asia’s worst-governed megacity,” says Arif Hasan, an eminent Karachi architect and town planner.
When it comes to buying weapons, however, Karachi is king. That Karachi traders must sell gun lubricant to make ends meet shows just how far the city has sunk. Or it could be interpreted another way: as an example of the indomitable entrepreneurial spirit that makes this filthy, frenetic place a magnet for so many Pakistanis. For as well as representing Pakistan’s dysfunction, Karachi embodies its resilience.
Wander Hazari’s bustling neighbourhood and you realise what energises Karachi is not religion or ethnicity or politics, but commerce and its universal corollary: the dream of a better life.
Karachi’s Urdu speakers called themselves Mohajirs and formed the MQM that dominates the city today. The party owes its rise to “efficient organisation and willingness to use violence and intimidation to achieve its goals”, according to the US State Department. But Karachi’s ethnic makeup is changing, and this is challenging MQM’s traditional dominance.
The city’s relative prosperity has long lured people from across the country. However, military operations against the Taliban in the northwest have accelerated the influx of ethnic Pashtun and boosted the influence of the Awami National Party (ANP), which claims to represent them.
In short, Karachi is driven by complex ethnic and political fault lines, which intersect bafflingly with local criminal interests and national affairs. And when every resource — every job, house or bucket of clean water — is scarce, and every vote coveted, it is no surprise that the prospect of civic harmony feels remote.
That the MQM, its ally the ruling PPP, and the ANP have militant armed wings is one of Karachi’s worst-kept secrets. Their leaders deny this in strikingly similar terms, portray themselves not as perpetrators of violence but as its peace-loving victims.
The gulf between Karachi’s political leaders is mirrored on the streets. “Employers only give jobs to members of their own ethnic group,” says Abdul Ahad, a Kashmiri resident of the Mohajir-dominated district of Nazimabad.
Mohammad Kashif, 18, showed off three bullet holes in his family’s tea shop. Fighting broke out after a neighbour was killed and “cut to pieces” while buying bread in a Pashtun area, he says. Kashif hid in his house for three days until the Rangers arrived to enforce a fragile truce. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty,” says Kashif. “The situation could get bad again.”
Achieving peace is not the only critical issue dividing Karachi’s politicians. For the past two years, this megacity has been in an administrative limbo, while the PPP and MQM squabble over how it should be run: by a locally elected government or centrally appointed bureaucrats.
So is there any good news? Ghazi Salahuddin, a member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) who investigated the recent violence, has mixed feelings. On one hand, he takes heart in Karachi’s growing civic-mindedness, pointing to successful local nonprofits. On the other, he wonders whether such efforts will be “overwhelmed by the darkness”.
By that, he means continued political bloodshed. If Karachi’s future depends upon its politicians, then it’s hard to be optimistic. “None of the parties negotiate on principles,” says town planner Hasan, who is also chairman of the Urban Resource Centre.
Yet Hasan finds cause for hope in an unusual place: urbanisation.
At Karachi’s universities, for example, women students often outnumber men, even in traditionally male-dominated subjects. These young women also seem to be marrying much later, as are the men. “For the first time in the history of this city, you have an overwhelming majority of unmarried adolescents, which is enough to change family structures and gender relations,” says Hasan. “Project these figures 10 years from now and you will have a totally different Karachi.”
Karachi is doomed, Karachi is indestructible. Meet students and you sense they are battling with the same contradiction. They despair of ever dislodging the politicians they unanimously blame for the city’s dysfunction. But they still have hope for their hyperkinetic hometown. When I asked Fariha Sajid, a 21-year-old architecture student, which part of Karachi was her favorite, she shot me a challenging look. “All of it,” she replied.
