The 9/11 Wars (59 page)

KARACHI

The problem, as ever, was not stasis or ‘backwardness’ but change. One place where the changes in Pakistan were very evident was Karachi. Two of the most significant developments in the time Bhutto was in exile were the economic boom during the period and the rapid growth of Pakistan’s urban population. Both of these had fundamentally changed Karachi, as they had changed the nation as a whole.

To stand on a street corner in central Karachi in late 2007 and watch the traffic was as good a way as any to appreciate the rapid evolution of Pakistani society. The city was home to around 15 million inhabitants, composed of communities from all over the country.
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It was dominated politically if not necessarily demographically by Mohajirs, the descendants of the refugees who had fled India in 1947. Yet the Mohajirs shared the city with around 4 million Pashtuns and large communities of Baluchis from the province to the west, Sindhis from the vast semi-desert interior province that dominates the south of Pakistan and a smaller number of Punjabis from the country’s richest and most populous province in the north-east.
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Each community had its own neighbourhoods, ran its own religious, cultural and social establishments and spoke its own mother tongue rather than, or at least in addition to, Urdu, the national language.
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The communities in Karachi had distinctive socio-economic profiles too. The Punjabis, small in number, were affluent; the Pashtuns were either wealthy and successful businessmen (particularly in the transport trade) or relatively poor immigrants; the Sindhis and the Baluchis, often recent arrivals from rural areas, were the poorest and lived in vast shantytowns. The Mohajirs constituted much of the mass in the middle: the petty tradesmen, the teachers, the pharmacists, the clerks, the minor officials, the small and middling businessmen, the doctors. On the whole the Mohajirs supported the disciplined, authoritarian, nominally secular (and on occasion extremely violent) Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) party.
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Some of the wealthy of Karachi, cantoned in the plush and leafy seaside suburbs like Clifton, had only recently become rich. Others were the heirs of the big proprietors created or co-opted by the British overlords during their conquest and occupation in the nineteenth century. It was there that the Bhuttos, quintessential feudals themselves, had their town home.
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Karachi had earned a reputation as a violent city in the 1980s and 1990s as political parties broadly representing the different ethnic groups fought bloody battles at elections and in the streets for control of the city. Thousands had died until the army had been deployed to restore order. Since then, the guns had largely fallen silent, though the city, caught nonetheless by some of the secondary effects of the 9/11 Wars, had still seen enough violence to reinforce its reputation for harbouring and nurturing extremism. There had been riots during the campaign in Afghanistan of 2001, and then in January 2002, Daniel Pearl, the American Jewish reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
, had been kidnapped in the city by a group of Islamic militants and then beheaded by al-Qaeda.
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In the autumn of that year, it had been in an upmarket middle-class suburb of Karachi that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the key 9/11 conspirators, had been captured. The city’s many religious schools were a source for recruits not only to Pakistan’s own many militant groups but for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
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One, the famous Binoria, was draped in banners exhorting participation in ‘the Afghan jihad’ as late as 2006.
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Most recently the lawless and deprived slums of Orangi in the west, split into Mohajir and Pashtun neighbourhoods, had seen riots and gunfights which had killed dozens over two days in May 2007. These were not, however, linked to any broader conflict, but due in part to ethnic tensions, in part to political manoeuvring between President Musharraf, his supporters and lawyers contesting his authority.

Yet Karachi, despite the crumbling infrastructure and the violence, remained the country’s commercial powerhouse, alone generating 68 per cent of the government’s revenue and 25 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
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If the historic city of Lahore, 650 miles to the north, was Pakistan’s cultural capital, and Islamabad, the new town created in the 1960s on a relatively cool plateau under the foothills of the Himalayas a two-hour flight away, was the administrative capital, then Karachi was the undisputed business and financial centre and continued to make money even in the worst of times. Off the main Ibrahim Ismail Chundrigar Road, the Karachi Stock Exchange had seen a 1,000 per cent rise between 1999 and 2007, making a small number of people extremely rich and a larger number significant amounts of money. According to the city’s mayor in late 2008, Kamal Mustafa, the model for development for many in Karachi was not the West or even, more locally, ‘Shining India’, though Pakistanis were impressed by their neighbour’s apparent rapid growth. Shanghai, Singapore and Dubai comprised ‘the aspirational dream’, he said. There were more flights to the United Arab Emirates, just two hours away across the Arabian Sea, than to Islamabad, Mustafa pointed out, and investment flows reinforced the sense of proximity as Middle Eastern cash poured into construction projects across the city.
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Standing on the corner, watching Karachi’s traffic, you would see at first sight chaos, like anywhere in Pakistan. Donkey traps, trucks, multi-coloured coaches, overloaded minibuses with dozens of schoolchildren hanging from the doors, hawkers pushing barrows, bicycles and cars of all sizes. The $1,000 motorbikes ceded passage to the tiny, tinny $5,000 five-seater Suzuki Mehrans, which gave way to the $15,000 saloons which in turn moved aside to allow the $60,000 SUVs favoured by major bureaucrats, senior businessmen, ministers and other wealthy and powerful figures to cruise past in air-conditioned comfort. To anyone who had seen Karachi in the 1990s the vastly increased amount of traffic choking the streets at the end of the following decade was striking. More than 500 new cars took to the road each day in 2007. There had been a total increase of 700,000 privately owned vehicles in five years.
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Musharraf’s finance minister, a smooth former banker, had pushed through reforms of the banking sector in 2001 and 2002 which had made credit easily available, and between 2001 and 2007 car ownership in the city had risen by roughly 40 per cent per year as a result.
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Though unequally distributed, the new money had significant effects. Those who had once had a bicycle now had a motorbike; those who had had a motorbike now had their families loaded into an 800cc Mehran. Many of those once driving the tinny little Mehrans now had an imported saloon, and the number of SUVs had increased exponentially. According to pollster and economic analyst Ijaz Gilani, Karachi was ‘an upwardly mobile place’.
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It was not just Karachi that had experienced such change during the years of Musharraf’s rule. The combination of new neoliberal economic policies, the lifting of American sanctions, a massive flow of remittances from Pakistanis suddenly feeling precarious in post 9/11 USA or Europe, loan write-offs granted once Pakistani support for the ‘War on Terror’ was assured, the generous rescheduling of further debts as well as the effect of new technologies such as mobile phones had unleashed a comprehensive boom across much of the country.
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Per capita revenues rose to over $1,000 for the first time.
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Foreign Direct Investment in Pakistan had gone from $322 million in 2002 to $3.5 billion in 2006, and GDP had doubled between 1999 and 2007, with growth rates hitting 9 per cent. One consequence was soaring property prices, which themselves created a huge amount of new wealth, very visible in the deliberately conspicuous consumption on show at ‘the society’ functions favoured by the elite of the major cities.
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The critical element in terms of political economy, however, was not that the rich got richer but that the economic growth also created a much bigger and better-connected middle class. Since independence, Pakistan had always lacked a middle class of the size and influence seen in much of the rest of the Islamic world. This was no longer the case, however. The World Bank estimated that 5 per cent of Pakistan’s population – or roughly 9 million people – appeared to have moved from living in poverty to being part of the lower middle class between 2001 and 2004 alone.
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These were the people who had swapped their family motorbike for a family car and who were now clogging the country’s cities.

Another crucial shift was the acceleration of the already relatively rapid rate of urbanization in Pakistan. By 2008, well over a third of Pakistanis lived in cities, and the proportion was increasing by 3 per cent each year.
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The rate of urbanization was one of the fastest in the world. With the population of the country itself continuing to grow rapidly, this meant the rapid creation of large urban masses. Karachi itself was adding more than half a million people a year to its population. Other cities – Nowsherah, Hyderabad, Faisalabad, Lahore, Rawalpindi – were growing equally fast. Why was the new wealth and the new urbanization important in the context of the 9/11 Wars? Because the urban middle classes were also the people who, from Morocco to Malaysia, had been absolutely key over previous decades in determining the political evolution of their societies. Above all, they had provided the principal constituency for political Islamism, underpinning the popularization of the ideology through the 1980s and, in many places, the 1990s too. There seemed little reason that Pakistan should be any different. One reason for the failure of Islamist parties in Pakistan in elections, apart from the deeply corrupt nature of the campaigning, was that there had been no substantial urban, particularly lower, middle class. By 2007, this was changing.

FEUDALS, TELEVISIONS AND DEFERENCE

There were two further features of the decade that Bhutto had spent in exile that were particularly significant. The first was the impact of mass communications on Pakistani society. One of Musharraf’s first acts had been to liberalize the country’s telecoms sector, allowing hundreds of private satellite channels to start broadcasting alongside the stultifying state network. This was of added importance given the nature of the news that those television channels carried. The second was the steady weakening of traditional social hierarchies that the economic boom, the new media and increased literacy meant.

If, having stood on a street corner in Karachi for half an hour in that autumn of 2007, you had got into one of the overcharged, over-decorated buses coming past and, having changed at one of the vast and chaotic bus stations on the outskirts of the city, continued on one of the main highways north, crammed into your seat among the migrant workers, returning students, off-duty soldiers, pilgrims and chickens for five or six hours, you would have arrived at a nondescript, fly-blown country town called Moro. Taking a rickshaw for a further half-hour journey down country lanes between the sugar cane and wheat fields (the proportion of each crop depending on the time of year) would take you to the village of Jatoi, named after the local landowning family, one of the most powerful and wealthy in southern Pakistan. Here, even in this most rural of settings, you would have found evidence of these vital changes. The main division in the village was not between rich and poor, between those with their own cars or bikes or donkeys and those without, between those speaking the local language of Sindhi or the minority whose mother tongue was Soraiki, between Sunnis or Shias (10 per cent of Pakistan’s population), or even between Muslims and the often persecuted local Christian community. It was not even between those who sided with the local barber and those who backed his wife in their interminable marital rows. It was between those who patronized the teashop of Ghulam Razzaq, who had installed a television a few weeks previously, and those who preferred the teashop of Hadyattullah, who had not.

By 2003, even before a second wave of deregulation, a third of Pakistanis were estimated to be regular watchers of TV.
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By 2007, the proportion was even higher with some channels claiming national audiences of up to 70 million for some programmes. Tuned permanently to local Sindhi-language television, Ghulam Razzaq’s television attracted a growing clientele who sat for hours, at least during the slack season when there was little work in the fields, before its soap operas, musical films and news bulletins and debates. The latter, vociferous, lively and often as ill informed as they were ill mannered, had become by far the most popular programmes on the major Urdu- and English-language channels such as Geo and Dawn TV, though their local-language equivalents also attracted huge numbers of viewers. Asked what difference the television had made to their lives, villagers were divided. Not much, said many. But all agreed they knew more now about ‘world politics’, which appeared largely to consist of the West oppressing Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan, and about the venality and incompetence of their own rulers. As with al-Jazeera in the Arab world a few years earlier, the explosion of Pakistani media had not meant an informed and rational discussion of important issues but the broad dissemination and reinforcement of the outlook of the ‘Pakistani street’. Al-Jazeera had broadcast graphic images of the second Palestinian intifada in 1999 and 2000 into the homes of tens of millions of people in the Middle East. The Pakistani channels had no shortage of such material. Launched at the beginning of the 9/11 Wars, they gave their viewers a gruesome and one-sided take on the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, the problems in Europe, episodes such as the cartoon crisis and the continuing violence in Israel-Palestine. The news channels were flanked by scores of religious networks, devoted to twenty-four-hour readings from the Koran or sermons or lessons on Islamic jurisprudence which also attracted, cumulatively if not individually, a substantial audience.