On 13 January 2018, 27-year-old Naqeebullah Mehsud was shot dead in a ‘police encounter’ on the outskirts of Karachi, in a relatively deserted area. With him, three other suspected militants were killed.

The police believed these men were associated with regional terrorist organisations. As news of this encounter (framed as a ‘shoot-out’ between the police and suspected militants) began trickling into newsrooms, it was reported as per usual: its details remained unquestioned and no independent investigations were carried out. The leading English-language daily, Dawn, reproduced the police version:

“Acting on a tip-off by intelligence agencies regarding the presence of some militant hideouts… on the outskirts of the metropolis, contingents of Malir police conducted a targeted raid. Having sniffed the raid, the suspects resorted to firing and hurled a hand grenade, but could not hurt the police, whose retaliatory firing killed four suspects.”

The remainder of the report quoted the former Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Anwar Ahmed Khan (better known as Rao Anwar), the so-called ‘encounter specialist’.

Anwar had started his career in Karachi during a security operation in the early 1990s known as “Operation Clean-Up” (1992-94). Then sub-inspector, Anwar quickly escalated up the ranks, a rare professional advancement in the rigid hierarchical structure of the police. The 1994 British documentary Karachi Kops described how Anwar was “regarded as a promising young Turk of the force.”

The recent acquittal, after five years, of former Sindh Police SSP Rao Anwar and others in the Naqeebullah Mehsud murder case has once again brought extrajudicial killings by law enforcers into the spotlight. Dr Zoha Waseem’s recent book explores how the police culture in post-colonial Karachi has developed against its historical and political contexts. Eos presents an extract from Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi…

More than two decades later, Anwar became one of the most notorious police officers in another security operation, the “Karachi Operation” that began in 2013, to again ‘clean up’ the city from what were perceived to be anti-state elements: armed terrorists, criminal gangs, political party workers and other actors deemed to be directly involved in both violent and nonviolent crimes.

New geographies of crime and terrorism had emerged in the years preceding this operation, creating a “dramatic theatre” in which the repressive role of law enforcement agencies was consciously brought to the fore to cater to the public’s preoccupation with militarised responses to a range of security threats and to satisfy the appetite of those who consumed televised coverage of armed policing operations and read detailed accounts of police killings in the daily papers.

In the course of the operation, between 2013 and 2017, more than 2,000 individuals were killed by law enforcement agencies (led by the Karachi police and the paramilitary organisation Sindh Rangers). We may never know how many of those killed extrajudicially in ‘encounters’ had established links with armed militant groups or criminal gangs that were the objects of these security operations.

But condemning militarised practices that were shielded by narratives of ‘counterterrorism’ and ‘counterinsurgency’ was off-limits. At the time, Karachi was reeling from decades of ethno-political violence and terrorism; militants had shocked the nation by attacking a school in Peshawar and killing more than 140 staff and children, and military-led counterterrorism operations were being conducted across Pakistan.

In this environment, critics of militarised policing practices were labelled unpatriotic, antinationalist, or ‘anti-state’. Furthermore, police encounters, as a form of vigilantism, were popularised, lauded by civilians who either sought closer relations with state officials or wanted safer mobility in the city for themselves and their families.

Such practices were similarly condoned by politicians, bureaucrats and senior police officers who legitimised them by participating in award ceremonies that commemorated the ‘bravery’ and ‘courage’ of officers who had ‘eliminated security threats’. They were glorified by news channels with prominent journalists who accompanied security officers on late-night raids.

They were also, as was the case during the operations of the 1990s, part of the police response (and revenge) to the growing number of attacks on police officers themselves. More than 400 police officers were killed between 2013 and 2017. In this complex and volatile environment, Mehsud’s killing was a tragedy waiting to happen.

NOT ANOTHER ‘JIHADI’

Shortly after Mehsud’s death was reported, a local journalist brought the incident to the attention of a lawyer-cum-civil society activist — an independent candidate for the 2018 general elections in Pakistan. The activist, based in Karachi, reportedly shrugged it off, considering this to be ‘just another jihadi’ killed in an encounter.

Just days later, Mehsud’s photograph circulated on social media, supported by statements from family and friends confirming his identity. Mehsud was an aspiring model and shopkeeper, originating from South Waziristan — he had no known affiliations to any militant organisations.

The activist grew interested and collaborated with others to move the judiciary. The Supreme Court took a suo moto notice (literally: on its own motion). Police officers themselves began acknowledging that Mehsud was likely to have been killed in a ‘staged encounter’.

What was initially perceived as another neglected extrajudicial killing morphed into a nation-wide movement that shook Pakistan. Mass protests were held across the country, led by the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (Pashtun Protection Movement), highlighting the plight of Pakistan’s ethnic minority Pashtuns — their enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

Mehsud’s death and the subsequent rise of a social movement condemning violence meted out by state authorities in Pakistan created a shift. As John and Jean Comaroff wrote about police violence and its popularity, “As the state acts on popular desire for more immediate forms of violence and stages the appearances of a powerful police for its people, this almost necessarily backfires.”

And it did. Inquiries were conducted. Anwar was suspended and briefly went into hiding, before attempting to flee the country. The subsequent investigations placed him and his accomplices (other police officers) at the location of Mehsud’s extrajudicial killing.

An inquiry committee found that Mehsud was picked up by plain-clothed officers about 10 days before his death, during which time he was kept in illegal confinement and subjected to torture. Eyewitness accounts were taken to investigate Anwar’s history, but were later withdrawn (due to, as the inquiry report stated, “a grave sense of insecurity [that] prevails amongst the residents of the area”, who are afraid to testify against the police).

Extrajudicial killings carried out by the police were discontinued, but only briefly, and the operation came to a grinding but quiet halt. Anwar was labelled a ‘black sheep’ by his own colleagues, although he continued to receive protection from the civil and military elite, due to his affiliations with sections within the intelligence agencies (including those who had provided him with the group of civilians, one of whom was Mehsud), political parties (including the provincial political party that empowered Anwar) and his close ties with powerful real-estate developers, most notably Bahria Town Karachi, none of whom would be held accountable for grooming an officer like Anwar.

But soon the pushback against militarised policing and the extra-legal use of force fizzled out. Within a year, the investigation and trial had stalled and Anwar continued to reside in his own residence in Malir, now classified as a ‘sub-jail’, with few restrictions on his mobility (a protection afforded to officers with good patronage networks in exchange for informal practices — a process that is part of what I call in this book “procedural informality”).

Sadly, Mehsud’s father succumbed to cancer, having never received justice for his son’s murder. The ‘unofficial policy’ to temporarily discontinue police encounters was abandoned. Though nowhere near as frequent as they were prior to 2018, Karachi still saw periodic occurrences of police encounter killings, a militarised practice that depicted both the trigger-happiness of police officers as well as the internalisation of narratives of ‘war’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘security’.

The subjects of these practices continued to be, primarily, the most marginalised groups in Karachi, across the various ethnic communities that diversify the city: Pashtuns, Baloch and Muhajirs. Its perpetrators, likewise, were socio-economically marginalised rank-and-file officers, predominantly from working-class backgrounds, aspiring to be the next ‘super cops’. Most of these encounters were uninvestigated and some were unreported.

IN SEARCH OF ‘SUPER COPS’

It was during this period, in 2015, and less than three years prior to Mehsud’s death, that I stood off the Northern Bypass, one of the primary highways north of Karachi, where police encounters were routinely staged during the “Karachi Operation”.

A handful of reporters gathered next to me with their camera crew and media vans. We were invited to observe a police ‘shoot-out’ with alleged militants, taking place a short distance away. That night, news channels flashed tickers and reporters presented details about the police ‘operation’.

Anwar was on the screen, explaining how the eight men killed were reportedly affiliated with Al-Qaeda. There was no way to confirm this. Some reporters tried to find out details of those killed in this encounter over the following days, but managed to investigate little.

While Anwar operated with an independence and impunity not afforded to all police officers, he was the product of a culture of policing that had tolerated, if not condoned and encouraged, police repression and state violence.

His rise and prominence can be read in the context of decades of urban violence in Karachi, in the midst of which the police repeatedly operated like a “nervous state under pressure”, with the legal authority to use force, but no monopoly over the use of coercion and violence, resource constraints and capacity issues, and a tendency to resort to reactive policing methods as and when police authority was challenged.

And it must also be understood in the context of a state and society that glorified ‘tough cops’ and ‘super cops’, and where the killing of another ‘encounter specialist’, Chaudhry Aslam Khan — Pakistan’s so-called ‘toughest cop’, credited for helping ‘bind’ the city of Karachi together — granted him the title of a ‘martyr’; in effect, vindicating him for the extra-legal actions he took in the line of duty, actions that could not have been possible without the patronage he received both within and beyond the confines of his institution.

The pedestalisation of Anwar and Aslam should also be read alongside the narratives that reflect “global trends in hyper-security, such as the conflating of crime and terrorism”, and contemporary state apparatuses that mirror and reflect colonial policing philosophies of the so-called ‘civilised’, geared at suppressing internal threats from indigenous communities (the ‘uncivilised’), thus linking extra-legal police practices and police vigilantism to broader aspirations of ‘security’ (that of the regime, above all else).

These ‘colonial continuities’, however, are of course not without variations, nor are they constant, but neither can they be captured by restricting our analysis to repressive policing practices alone.

Indeed, such colonial continuities in policing can also be seen through routine, everyday police work, which is, above all else, about policemen trying to survive under institutional pressure and with their own insecurities.

Therefore, pinning such police ‘vigilantism’ or malpractices generally on individual police officers or ‘dirty workers’ (personifying, partly, the “Dirty Harry problem”), or even on some abstract notion of ‘police culture’ (notoriously referred to in South Asia as “thaana culture”), would constitute a reductive analysis of what the police do and why, and under what demands and circumstances.

It would similarly be naive to boil down policing to just vigilantism, without acknowledging the broader social, cultural, and political forces that sustain such police practice, and the institutional dynamics within law enforcement agencies that enable certain policing phenomena — such as corruption and violence (and other forms of ‘dirty work’) — to reinforce each other.

But above all, at the risk of complicating a complex intermingling of policing and security further, it would also be limiting to only include ‘exceptional police practices’, such as extrajudicial executions, and not the ordinary, routine, day-to-day police work and its formal and informal operations and activities, especially when the ordinary and the exceptional sustain each other, and exceptional practices — such as police violence — often rely on the existence of ordinary informalities within the institutions of the state that can excuse, enable, or conceal that which is unacceptable, or that which does not fall under broader security agendas and their legal mandates.

Without this intersection of the exceptional and the routine, it would be difficult to understand why the police personify the idea of a “nervous state under pressure” that has to routinely negotiate for its legitimacy and authority, turning to elite patrons and institutions for support, or depicting spectacular forms of violence to win over public trust, a dynamic that Beatrice Jauregui describes as the “provisional authority” of the police — that which is contingent upon the police’s various audiences, competitors, clients and patrons, which can both empower and disempower police officers.

By trying to connect both the exceptional practices and routine activities, we can also understand why the police in South Asia remain a “despised minority”, even though they are often recognised as being vulnerable, exploitable, “expendable” and deprived of basic human rights, such as adequate pay and sanitary working conditions, with their senior officers routinely under pressure from politicians, bureaucrats, the judiciary, and other security institutions.

These institutional dynamics of the post-colonial police thus become equally important, and so do the popular debates on police culture.

POST-COLONIAL POLICING

How then can we explain these complexities in police culture and these insecurities that underlie police work, especially in a post-colonial city where an “ordered disorder” creates what Laurent Gayer describes as a “complex ecology of violence co-produced by the city’s belligerents in the course of their interactions”, that is expected to be dealt with through state intervention, often in the form of coercion and violence meted out by law enforcement agencies?

Is there a unique way of understanding the culture of policing in certain jurisdictions that are characterised by their colonial past and post-colonial context? These are the questions I address in this book.

The study of everyday police work — both the ordinary and the extraordinary — helps us understand the colonial continuities and the postcolonial contextualities that persist in these institutions. Studying police work up close, ethnographically, explains why militarised and informal policing practices have become such normalised features of policing in post-colonial contexts.

Above all, I show that the normalisation of these practices is the consequence of policemen trying to survive and thrive under institutional pressure and individual insecurities. This study also helps explain the unique position and challenges that face policing institutions at the intersection of state-society relations in volatile and uncertain political environments.

Finally, it sheds light on why police reform efforts across the global South have largely failed to yield meaningful change.

Cosmetic developments in policing — in the form of modernised equipment and donor-funded reforms of policing, sans any structural and foundational transformations — are unlikely to shake off colonial legacies, keeping the legitimacy of the police minimal at best.

This ethnographic investigation allows me to discern what it is about postcolonial policing organisations that makes them susceptible to militarisation and informal practices — to trace how they take effect — and to understand what it is about the environment in which the police operate that demands these styles of policing and ensures their persistence. Thus, this study provides important new insights into the structural drivers behind some of the most controversial and hotly debated aspects of police practice and culture around the world.

Karachi is an ideal city in which to study post-colonial policing and address these questions. Karachi’s political environment is a confluence of many of the maladies that affect post-colonial cities, including ethnic and sectarian tensions, land insecurity, weak state capacity and civil–military tensions — to name a few.

The city is notorious for its violent, extrajudicial and corrupt policing practices. Here, the security apparatus is still made to carry the burden of its colonial past, by and large due to the way successive regimes in Pakistan have chosen to utilise its infrastructure to secure their own gains (much like the dynamics seen in other post-colonial societies, such as Ghana and Nigeria).

And thus, the story of policing in Karachi is about everyday insecurities, explosive political confrontations, nervous regimes, bitter rivalries, vengeance and entitled elites. In this way, it is a story about post-colonial policing more broadly, which will resonate well beyond the spatial and temporal limits of this book.

Furthermore, policing in Pakistan has generated little academic interest, even though the police are one of the most problematic and problematised public institutions, but perhaps also the most impactful, given that ubiquitous practices of everyday urban policing are influential in shaping relations between the state and society.

This ethnography is the first of its kind to investigate how police culture in post-colonial Karachi has developed against its historical and political contexts, unsupported by substantial reforms or adequate policymaking. I show how policing in Karachi has been influenced by both colonial and post-colonial securitisation processes resulting from evolving security threats, perceived and actual, thus contributing to the militarisation and informalisation of police work and culture.

By shining the spotlight on urban policing in Pakistan, I reveal how the phenomena of police militarisation and “procedural informality” are interconnected, undergirded by insecure regimes that treat crime, public order and dissent as national security threats, and burden an ill-suited police force with protecting the state from these threats rather than serving the community.

I call this syndrome, characterised by regime insecurity and resulting securitisation, militarisation and informality in policing and police work, the “post-colonial condition of policing”.

By giving an ethnographic account of what public policing looks like and how policing and security are performed in the insecure post-colonial polity, this book paves the way for deepening existing knowledge on post-colonial governance and governmentality.

As such, it contributes to literature on critical criminology and critical security studies by introducing the framework of the ‘post-colonial condition of policing’, while also providing a unique empirical contribution that foregrounds the experiences of police officers caught in the middle of Pakistan’s political conflicts.

Excerpted with permission from Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi, published by Hurst and Oxford University Press (October 2022).

Dr Zoha Waseem is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick.
Her peer-reviewed research has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Policing and Society and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. She tweets @ZohaWaseem

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 12th, 2023

Header photo: The police regularly carry out operations against suspected criminals in many localities across Karachi —Mujeebur Rehman/White Star