KARACHI'S periodic violence is probably the only constant in all the turmoil the country is facing. The government has made multiple attempts to initiate political dialogue amongst the stakeholders, and even drastic proposals such as curfews and operations have been contemplated.

US national-security expert and director of the RAND Corporation's Center for Global Risk and Security, Gregory Treverton, has notably made a distinction between 'puzzles' and 'mysteries'. A puzzle has a definite, factual answer. Treverton gives the example of Osama bin Laden, whose precise location is a puzzle. He cannot be apprehended because of lack of access to crucial information. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It was not a question that had one simple, correct answer.

Mysteries require judgement and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part in most cases is not the lack of information but rather an abundance of it. Cultural commentator Malcolm Gladwell uses the distinction to analyse the Enron case. The audit process is designed to identify errors and omissions in financial accounts, not to spot excessive complexity or risk, as auditors generally are not trained to practice a holistic analysis. Characterising the Enron case as a mystery instead of a puzzle explains the inability of auditors to detect the fraud.

A mystery poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent upon multiple complex variables and on the future interaction of various factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future.

Political parties and the federal and provincial governments have treated the violence in Karachi as a puzzle, hence their quest for unambiguously correct answers. One example is the idea that the panacea to the unrest lies in deweaponising the city. The logic is unbelievably simple: since guns kill people, no guns will mean no violence. The naiveté of the explanation is offset by its universal palatability, and having reached the supposedly correct answer gives stakeholders comfort and certainty. The only problem with this analysis is that the violence in Karachi is a mystery, not a puzzle. It does not have unequivocal answers.

The nature of violence in Karachi in the last couple of years is distinctly different from that in the past. Previously it was largely ethnic in nature. It was an attempt, albeit a desperate one, to mitigate the fragmentation of social and ethnic life in Karachi through the creation of a restricted and ultimately unviable form of local, collective social order. It reinforced ethnic identities and hence tangentially served in creating and maintaining political hegemonies. Consequently, political parties (primarily ethnically divided) had an interest in its perpetuation.

In recent times the violence has transformed to being economic in nature, and hence the allegations are now primarily concerned with economic endeavours such as the drug and land trades. Applying Karl Marx to violence in Karachi, the progression of violence from being socially and ethnically focused to being economically focused can be viewed as a transformation from a certain form of primitive socialism to a vehicle for primitive accumulation processes.

The mere eradication of weapons in Karachi, though imperative, is not sufficient. The distribution of material resources within the city, principally land, needs to be addressed and is primarily a mystery. Excluding a few upper-middle-class localities, the city suffers from great uncertainty about property rights and titles, giving rise to an increasingly informal economy. Questions like distribution of urban land are not politically popular, and therefore politicians find it more convenient to stick to politicking instead. This question, unlike deweaponisation, has no definitive, simple and clearly enforceable answer.

And land is just one variable of the mystery; others include the economic implications of migration patterns, urban development, ethnic distribution, militancy, etc. Political solutions to socio-economic problems are not always feasible or actionable. Reductionist explanations and unrealistic timelines designed for mass consumption will relieve pressure temporarily, but are unlikely to alter the trajectory and instead will possibly aggravate the situation in the medium to long term.

The failure to resolve the crisis in Karachi stems not necessarily from unwillingness or malice, but rather from a failure to comprehend the nature and scope of this problem. Working out a mystery is not a question of collecting more information but rather of discovering a frame or lens for systematic analysis to make sense of the information already available. The development of consensus amongst political parties on broad-based agendas is unlikely to mitigate the situation if there is no cognizance of the nature and genesis of the violence.

The search for one-dimensional, correct answers is futile. When things go wrong with a puzzle it is easy to identify the culprit, since it is the party that has withheld critical information. Hence politicians, being particularly fond of identifiable offenders, are infinitely more comfortable with puzzles. Like the auditors of Enron, they are missing the big picture, either because they are not trained to look for it or because they do not want to.

The writer is a lawyer