BOOK
REVIEW Pakistan's Beirut Karachi: A Terror Capital in the
Making by Wilson John
Reviewed by
Chanakya Sen
Just as
Lebanon's capital Beirut was under the thumb of an
unbridled reign of crime, terrorism, sectarian and
religious fundamentalism in the 1980s, Pakistan's port
city of Karachi has hit headlines for all the wrong
reasons during the decade of the 1990s. Going by the
sobriquet of "The Untouchable City", Karachi has
regressed from bad to worse to worst in terms of law and
order,
social harmony and dangerous
externalities.
Journalist Wilson John's pithy
new book probes the reasons why and the processes how
Karachi turned into a potpourri of fanaticism and
mayhem. Rife with heroin, hired killers, extortionists
and jihadi groups, Karachi "reflects the times and
tribulations of a nation that is increasingly becoming
hostage to forces of terror". (p 2) John's sole
objective in collecting diverse facts about Karachi's
descent into chaos and joining them with the analytical
thread is "to focus world attention on a very real
threat that lurks in the shadows of this metropolis". (p
3)
Wounds of history In
1947, the British designated Karachi as the capital of
Pakistan. Mass movement of refugees during partition
shifted the demographic profile of the city.
Urdu-speaking Mohajirs from India's United Provinces and
Bihar and Punjabis pushed out the original Sindhi
inhabitants. The schism between Punjabi and other
minority communities deepened when the national capital
was shifted from Karachi to Islamabad in 1961.
The new rulers of Pakistan "abandoned Karachi
... the political establishment, military, intelligence
and the bureaucracy were willing to look the other way"
(p 7) as the city became infested with drug traffickers
and gunrunners, with relentless bloodletting.
The 1971 India-Pakistan war brought new refugees
to Karachi, Bengali-speaking Muslims who were
predominantly Sunni. The Afghanistan jihad of the 1980s
witnessed another mass in-migration of a million Pashtun
refugees into the city. By then, Karachi drug barons
decided who would be the next governor or prime
minister, Sunni and Shi'ite extremists were killing in
the name of Islam, and the city was set up by the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as the main
operational center and recruitment office for the
mujahideen. Karachi's troubled past proved advantageous
to the merchants of intolerance and hatred.
Ethnic friction Pakistan's
Punjabi-dominated military assiduously promoted the
Mohajirs to counter rising ethno-nationalism among
Sindhis. In 1972, a Mohajir taxi driver in the United
States, Altaf Hussain, was persuaded by the army to
return to Pakistan and float the Mohajir Qaumi Movement
(MQM). Keen on dividing Sindh on ethnic lines, General
Zia ul-Haq allowed the MQM to form a network of
professional militant bands with a hand in the drug
trade of Karachi. In 1988, the city was rocked by
unprecedented violence orchestrated by the army using
the MQM in order to oust Benazir Bhutto from power.
By 1992, the army wanted to contain the growing
power of Altaf Hussain and engineered a split in the
MQM, thereby inaugurating a bloody turf war in Karachi.
Gradually, the MQM's militant wing, the Black Cats,
composed of 5,000-6,000 hitmen and notorious criminals,
rose in stature. Carjacking, land grabbing, illegal
construction etc earned them a massive annual revenue
and the selfsame techniques of violence were copied by
sectarian outfits to kill Shi'ites. The MQM's extortion
coffers overflowed and abetted the party's remarkable
gains in successive elections.
Afghans in the
city, identified as a separate ethnic group, acted as
conduits for the ISI's arms markets. Concentrated in the
Gulzar-i-Hjiri area of Karachi, they supplied weapons
and explosives to Sikh, Tamil and Kashmiri insurgents.
It is in their neighborhood that US journalist Daniel
Pearl's mutilated body was found.
Sectarian
cleft Shi'ite-Sunni slayings intensified after
General Zia's 1979 imposition of Islamic penal code,
Shariat, and Islamic taxation. In response to the
formation of the Tehreek-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqh-i-Jafria by
Shi'ites, the army and the ISI helped launch
Anjuman-i-Sipah-i-Sahiba (SSP) under Sunni extremists.
Pakistani governments successively showed munificence to
Sunni madrassas (religious schools), recruiting
grounds for SSP and its sister organization, the
Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LIJ). In 1997, there were 165 Sunni
madrassas with 2,000 students each in Karachi.
The "jihadi outlook", redolent with sectarian and
religious venom, was tutored in these institutions. SSP
cadres were also trained as mujahideen in training camps
in Afghanistan, particularly to strengthen the terrorist
group Harkat-ul-Ansar.
The protection and
favoritism given by the state to the sectarian outfits
intensified Karachi's reputation as a haven for
international terrorists. The March 1995 shooting of two
US diplomats witnessed apathy and complicity of the
Karachi police. Murtaza Bhutto's assassination in
September 1996 was revealed by judicial enquiry to have
been cleared by "a higher authority". Akram Lahori, one
of the founders of the LIJ and an associate of Yemeni
elements of al-Qaeda, was involved in the manslaughter
of 40 persons, but let slip away by benefactors in the
police and army. "Bearded generals" have often winked at
massacres of Shi'ites, enabling the sectarian mafia to
rule Karachi informally.
Criminal den Crime syndicates took over Karachi after the Afghan
Transit Trade Agreement allowing duty-free imports of
goods through Karachi. A lucrative smuggling racket
called the "Quetta-Chaman Transport Mafia" controlled
the nerves of contraband trade. By 1991, tonnes of
heroin was passing through Karachi to various
international destinations. The illicit drug industry's
annual turnover in Pakistan reached US$10 billion,
one-fourth of the country's gross domestic product
(GDP).
Drug lords spread their influence in
Karachi under the umbrella of state patronage. The Memon
family syndicate and Dawood Ibrahim syndicates are
uncrowned kings of Karachi, thanks to their connections
and linkages with political and army higher-ups. When
the Indian government demanded the extradition of Dawood
and the Memon brothers for the 1993 Mumbai serial bomb
blasts, the former was temporarily sent to East Asia by
Islamabad. Dawood even revived Pakistan's central bank
with a huge dollar loan and dictated the cricket
match-fixing stakes. MQM-Haqiqi and SSP members have
joined Dawood's syndicate lately, engendering gang wars
on the streets of Karachi from August 2001.
The
ISI instigates gang wars for its own objectives and uses
crime syndicates to act as hawala (money
laundering) channels for terrorist organizations
operating in India, such as the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and
the Jammu Kashmir Islamic Front.
Terrorist
lair In 1986, Pan Am Flight 73 was hijacked by
the Abu Nidal terrorist group and landed in Karachi.
When asked why Karachi was chosen as the venue, one of
the hijackers replied: "It's so easy here." (p 37) With
fundamentalists as perfect allies and covers and a
warren of ghettos and "no go" areas offering anonymity,
Karachi's labyrinths are terrorists' favorite hiding
spots. Ramzi Yousef, the first well-known international
terrorist, took full advantage of Karachi's
infrastructure and set up an import-export firm first.
Then he started a school for "terrorists in transit",
boasting students such as Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard
Reid. With his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's help,
Ramzi planned the 1993 World Trade Center blast and flew
back to Karachi with Pakistan Airlines.
Maulana
Masood Azhar, founder of the Jaish-i-Muhammad (JIM),
studied at the Binori mosque complex in Karachi and went
on to don the mantle of ideologue of jihad against
India, aiming to recruit a million holy warriors for
Kashmir. Azhar's aims were complemented by the decision
of an Islamist international meeting in Khartoum to
nurture Karachi as a "center for terrorist operations in
Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Albania-Kosovo". (p
42) The Harkat-ul-Jihad-i-Islami, led by Qari Saifullah
Akhtar, another adviser to Taliban leader Mullah Omar,
like Azhar, acted as the hub for holy war stretching
from Grozny to Manila.
In December 1999,
Muhammad Atta and Ziad Jarrah flew to Karachi on their
way to Afghanistan for preparing the attacks that took
place in the United States on September 11, 2001. Sheikh
Omar Syed, another Karachi resident, part-financed the
attacks by wiring $100,000 to Atta via the ISI network.
Syed and Ramzi Binalshibh, aided by agent handler Abu
Zubaidah, ran al-Qaeda's top-secret Karachi cell before
and after September 11. To camouflage the presence of
al-Qaeda and Taliban cadres in the city, the cell
coopted Harkat-ul-Ansar, JIM and LIJ activists as foot
soldiers. On October 1, 2001, the cell executed a deadly
attack on the Jammu Kashmir assembly in India. The
December 13, 2001, attack on India's parliament can be
traced back through telephone records to the same
Karachi contacts.
The ISI was alarmed at Daniel
Pearl having an inkling of the major al-Qaeda regrouping
in Karachi and sent its "man for all missions", Sheikh
Omar Syed, to lure him into a ghastly murder. In May
2002, the Karachi cell activated a devastating blast
killing French technicians outside the Sheraton Hotel,
followed by the US Consulate bombing in June. The author
feels that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's newly
discovered Harkat-ul-jihad-al-Aalami is nothing but the
al-Qaeda Karachi cell.
City of omens Despite recent raids, holdups and arrests, John
concludes that the revival of the al-Qaeda cell is
inevitable as Karachi's support base is unshaken.
"Dawood Ibrahim and his associates remain unaffected by
the war on terrorism and will provide the new cell with
logistics." (p 73) His syndicate has reportedly shipped
Osama bin Laden's sidekick Ayman al-Zawahiri to safety
in Chittagong. Airport alertness having been pepped up,
terrorists will rely more and more on the sea route,
again roping in Karachi as the epicenter of the next
wave of terrorist strikes. Al-Qaeda is said to have
purchased a fleet of freighters and tested them out in
the October 2002 French oil-tanker explosion off the
coast of Yemen.
Karachi's image as a launch pad
for terrorism endures. The city is a warehouse of forged
travel documents and credit cards. Several fake
passports were mailed from Karachi to terrorists who
carried out the 1998 East African US embassy bombings.
According to intelligence inputs, several hundred
al-Qaeda terrorists are hiding in quarters of Karachi
such as the Defense Housing Society and Korangi. They
are, in the words of the United Nations Monitoring
Committee on al-Qaeda, "poised to strike again, how,
when and where they choose".
This book is highly
recommended for terrorism-studies junkies and
governments pursuing misdirected "wars on terrorism".
Its most valuable contribution is to highlight the guilt
of the Pakistani establishment in converting Karachi,
once the magnificent City of Lights, into another
Beirut.
Karachi: A Terror Capital in the
Making by Wilson John. Rupa & Co, New Delhi,
2003. ISBN: 81-291-0220-4, price US$4, 114
pages.
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Jan 17, 2004
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social harmony and dangerous
externalities. 
