Sol Sanders Archive

Hell on earth, due north of
the Arabian Sea

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In the convulsive migrations immediately after World War II, Karachi played a largely unreported role. The few Western visitors to what had been only months before a sleepy little fishing port and railhead saw an awesome spectacle after 1947: largely improvised shelters stretched as far as the eye could see. [Arthur Koestler described it: leaving an international aircraft was like getting hit in the face with a warm diaper, a soiled one.] Hundreds of thousands of Muslims sought refuge when the last British viceroy, Louis Lord Mountbatten, precipitously cleaved Imperial India into two independent states. The grim vista spread out from the temporary grave of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s first short-lived leader, a secularist who attempted to build a state on the basis of Muslim identity.

It wasn’t that Pakistan’s Siamese twin, the Republic of India, hadn’t simultaneously problems equally vast. When perhaps as many as two million died on both sides in the bloody Partition, survivors fled in all directions. But the five-times larger “India” had retained more of the colonial heritage, including British architect Edwin Lutyens’ grand New Delhi government buildings. Pakistan’s capital in Karachi — politicians later moved it as far north as possible — was improvised as everything else in the new country. Nor unlike Arabs fighting Zionists in British Mandated Palestine who became a permanent UN/U.S. charge about the same time, Karachi’s UPwallahs [named after their former home in United Provinces, now India’s Uttar Pradesh] were largely forgotten. The world was too busy elsewhere.

Somehow Karachi and Pakistan survived, a testament to fatalistic suffering in the Subcontinent. But now a new human wave is descending on the world’s largest — nearing 20 million — and most tempestuous megapolis. The Indus Valley’s worst floods ever — despite 150 years of irrigation and flood control — has uprooted some 20 million. Most are subsistence farmers with little to go back to after the waters subside and likely to swell Karachi’s already overwhelming burden. Local authorities have said they could absorb a million refugees. But that’s likely wild-eyed optimism — both as to minimizing numbers and estimating infrastructure.

This time, too, the world is caught up in a dozen other major and numberless minor crises — not least a worldwide economic recession. But it would ignore what happens in Karachi at its peril.

It is the major commercial, manufacturing center and only port of a nuclear-armed country of more than 170 million — among the poorest in the world — already beset by domestic terrorism linked to the war next door in Afghanistan from which it cannot disentangle. It’s from Karachi that logistics for American and NATO troops fighting terrorists in Afghanistan begins its hazardous thousand-mile overland trek.

Those terrorists have demonstrated agility in employing technology and adapting to counter Washington’s suppression efforts, suggesting they could transfer roots to urban environments just as they have successfully employed more and more native Western agents. Karachi’s Pushtoon industrial workforce — augmented by recent refugees from the Northwest Frontier where their kin shelter Al Qaida — is already an important base. Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder and Afghanistan Taliban's operations chief, was reportedly captured there in February.

The terrorists seek to exploit Karachi’s already seething ethnic frictions as well as poverty and rising crime. The Aug. 19 assassination of Ubaidullah Yusufzai, a leader of the secularist Awami National Party, led to communal rioting. That followed a wave of political killings after the Aug. 2 murder of Syed Raza Haider. Haider was a leader of the Mutahida Qaumi Movement [MQM], recruited from those Urdu-speaking post-independence refugees and their progeny now called Muhajirs. The MQM has dominated Karachi politics. But it’s indicative that their charismatic leader, Altaq Hussein, stays in London, apparently for his personal safety, leading the Party via electronic media. Adding to this explosive potential is that the new wave of refugees is mostly Sindhi, Karachi’s third component, the indigenous regional people still the majority in the flooded hinterland.

The terrorists have already threatened foreign aid-givers, while maximizing their own limited ability to woo villagers caught now by the flood as well as between clashing militarys. The recent murder of eight American and British volunteers in Afghanistan makes the threat credible.

British South Asia Muslims and others have contributed generously to relief funds. The U.S. has donated $200 million, some of it switched from $7.5 billion aid promised over the next five years, and contributed personnel and aircraft to rescue efforts. But the enormity of the tragedy and Pakistan’s ineffective bureaucracy limit effective relief. President Asif Ali Zardari, adding to his reputation for notorious corruption, continued a foreign trip as the floods struck. The military, Pakistan’s only effective national institution, has promised to shift resources from its campaign against insurgents and its permanent deployment against India. [MQM leader Hussein has called for martial law under the military — which has ruled more than half Pakistan’s history.]

However horrendous the immediate impact, the longer term effects on Karachi will be critical — not only for Pakistan, but for U.S. and world security.