More of the same just won’t do
On the surface, at least, they have thrown all but the kitchen sink at the mess that is Karachi. There’s been the operation, there are new terror laws, there have been thousands of arrests, and even the prime minister has taken personal interest in the port city’s security situation. Yet there is little worth writing home about. Scores of people continue to be killed by the day. There was a very brief respite in petty street crimes like phone snatching, etc, but the criminal underworld’s more preferred offences – murder, extortion, kidnapping – have gone on pretty much as before, some have even increased. And sectarian and religiously motivated attacks, of course, are still the order of the day.
The Taliban, too, are a big problem. It is no secret that militants have been bolstering their presence for a long time. And it’s not as if they are holed up in Karachi. They have literally ‘occupied’ large settled areas on the city’s fringes. The operation did target some of those areas – though mostly it concentrated on cells that made up the city’s usual turf war – but militants were certainly not uprooted. Also, TTP elements in the south may have been a little demoralised with the success of Zarb-e-Azb, but their potential for lethal blowback attacks should not be ruled out. In the worst case scenario, should some of their threats of reprisal attacks turn out true, the security setup does not seem prepared unless, of course, the army steps in directly.
What, then, must be done to bring some sort of normalcy to Karachi? The centre so concerned about the economic repercussions of the dharnas must also consider how the port city and financial hub drowned in turmoil also upsets the economy. So far, if the authorities are still clueless about the perfect solution, they must at least have figured out what not to do. So long as political rivalries are played out in proxy turf wars and corruption is allowed to hollow out the system of governance, neither militancy nor lesser crime will be controlled. There must first be unity of purpose, following which an actionable plan, approved by all stakeholders, can be adopted.
