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THREE years and several Altaf tirades later, the Karachi operation is a mystery in plain sight. Because strip away the coyness and hyperbole and we’re left with two questions.
Here’s what we do know: there are two basic goals in Karachi, one legitimate, the other not. The legitimate goal is to shut down the MQM’s militant wing. The not-so-legitimate aim is to separate Altaf from the MQM.
Each has a question, or perhaps a contradiction, at its heart.
Let’s start with the illegitimate goal: cleaving apart Altaf and the MQM and reconstituting the party as an acceptable political force in the city.
Whether it’s the existing MQM sans Altaf or a separate party of breakaways with that abomination, the PSP, folded into it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the myth that the strategy is predicated on, that there are two MQMs: one political and the other militant.
The political wing is supposed to be the white-collar guys, the project that saw its peak a decade ago when Mustafa Kamal was pouring concrete all over Karachi and the party was trying to break out of its ethnic shackles nationally.
The militant wing is supposed to be, well, militant and reports directly to Altaf. While the political wing practises politics, the militant wing enforces disciplines within the party and practises a violent kind of politics outside it.
Never are the twain supposed to meet and the bifurcation was at a visible peak when the political types gathered at Imran Farooq’s house in Karachi after his assassination.
Genuine tears were shed that night, but perhaps for reasons in addition to mourning a colleague — it was sinking in that not only could Altaf get any of them anywhere, but that he was insane enough to do it anywhere, even London.
It’s almost as if the boys don’t want to dismantle the militant apparatus as quickly as Karachi would like them to. But why?
Yet, in the three years since the Karachi operation began, a messy, and different, kind of story has emerged: the wall between the political and militants wings was never as strong as imagined, and perhaps had ceased to exist altogether.
Sift through the investigation reports and charges brought against the MQM’s militants since the operation began and there’s a recurring theme: the political lot, the ones we’re used to seeing on TV and in the assemblies, is regularly fingered.
They’re all there, sometimes threatening violence, sometimes sitting in while violence is being planned, sometimes indulging in it themselves. Whether bit players or front-line ones in any given incident, they’re always present, always participating and fully aware.
While little of it may stand up in court and the political lot will claim it’s being done to arm-twist them, the stories are so many, the details so vivid, the recollections so precise that it has to be asked: are there really two MQMs or is there just one?
That matters terribly because a fused political and militant wing calls into question the basic strategy of an MQM minus Altaf. If the political and militant wings really are fused together, then it’s a fool’s errand to try and separate the two.
And if the political and militant wings really are fused together, then what kind of hell is Karachi being set up for for another generation with an MQM minus Altaf to rule over it?
On to the legitimate goal: dismantling the militant set-up, ie the chaps who pull the trigger. The MQM isn’t Al Qaeda or IS. There are no franchises, freelancers or hangers-on. The militant faction is a monolith, fiercely disciplined and rigidly controlled.
That’s what allowed violence in Karachi to work like a spigot: on and off instantaneously and as desired. So, the question: why the hell has it taken three years and the militant wing has still not been shut down?
In the beginning, the argument was that many had scrambled and escaped abroad or to other parts of the country. Then, the argument was that the fusion between the political and militant factions made intelligence-gathering more difficult than had been anticipated.
But neither of that adds up. Aside from the human rights lot, there’s no real resistance to whatever is being done to get the MQM’s militants. The boys pretty much have carte blanche.
And yet there’s a maddening kind of calibration evident in the mission to shut down the militant cells. It mostly stays at a trickle with sudden spurts of action — like this week — but it never hits full throttle and sure doesn’t stay there.
It’s almost as if the boys don’t want to dismantle the militant apparatus as quickly as Karachi would like them to. But why?
A never-ending operation elicits the obvious conspiracy theories. What is obvious is that once — if — victory is declared against the MQM’s militants, the politicians will begin to roll back the boys’ special powers.
Powers that the boys don’t want to lose because there is a target beyond the MQM — perhaps one Asif Ali Zardari himself?
Amidst the nonsense of a revamped PPP in Sindh and the party apparently having grown a conscience, there has been one constant: Asif is not in Pakistan and the boys won’t let him come back.
He’s been as sly and fox-like as only he can be, but he’s also having to play his cards at a furious rate, making whatever concessions he can to try and get the boys to relent on him coming back to Pakistan.
Between the cat-and-mouse game of Asif and the boys and the boys’ seeming inability to eliminate the MQM militants may lie the only straight line that matters: finish off the militants quickly and the boys may lose their chance to get Asif.
All is never as it seems in luckless Karachi.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @cyalm
Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2016
