The lengthening shadow in Pakistan

Karachi, one of the world's megacities

Odd, isn't it, how nothing ever changes until it does. Take Cuba: the peasants were always staging their little rebellions and the army always put them down and Fulgencio Batista always remained in power. That's the way things were in Cuba because, well, nothing ever changed there. Then one day everything changed. [snapping her fingers] And just like that, Batista was gone.

It was only later, when it finally sank in that Cuba had changed, that people could look back and see there had been a lengthening shadow, the signs and portents warning that a change was coming.

You're 20 years old, your baby son has died of dehydration from dysentery, your wife is ill, you're unemployed and after two months of looking you still can't find work. There's no money, no food, and now there's no water, and even if you had the money to pay the gouge price the water mafia charges for water that's supposed to be free, now the electrical blackouts in Karachi mean that even the mafia has a hard time siphoning off water. The city has become hell, with armed robbers roving everywhere and gangs of refugees from the flooding in Sindh fighting with other gangs. You pass by a shop that has a television and see images of thousands of young men, men very much like yourself, massed in a place called Tahrir Square in Egypt; they're demanding the country's leader step down and they're protesting police brutality. A few days later you hear to your amazement that the leader has stepped down, that the head of the national police is under arrest.....

August 4, 2011, Business Standard (India):

Meanwhile, the Pakistani press is full of reports on how its economy is nose-diving. The overall budget deficit stands at 6.5 per cent of the GDP against a revised target of 4.7 per cent, and in the wake of the US cancelling $800 million worth of aid to Pakistan, officials in Islamabad are nervously wondering if they want to ask the IMF to revive its suspended bailout programme. Under the circumstances, Islamabad’s purported rejection of buying electricity from India, ostensibly because the power project is in Kashmir, would amount to cutting its nose to spite its face.

From the rest of the report it's not clear whether Pakistan has actually rejected the offer as yet. And in 2006 Pakistan's leaders similarly dragged their feet about accepting an offer from Iran to sell the country electricity at a subsidized rate. But the Business Standard report makes clear that Pakistan's Keepers of the Faith -- those Old Guard military men and civil servants who since the country's inception have defined the country's reason for existence to be 'destroy India' -- are playing political games about Kashmir with India's offer to sell electricity. This, despite the fact that Indian Kashmiris don't want Pakistan meddling in their affairs, as the recent election uproar in Kashmir made clear.

Pakistani pundit Mohammad Taqi did a good job the other day of sending up Pakistan's blinkered Old Guard, but there's not much room for levity when one studies Pakistan's electricity crisis and how it's playing into the cycle of violence in Karachi, which prompted the government on Tuesday to deploy paramilitary units in the city. The routine electrical blackouts, for up to 10 hours a day, have worsened the water-supply crisis in the city and added to the jobless crisis there. And all three crises exacerbate the violence in the poorer neighborhoods of the city, where most of the bloodshed has occurred. But unlike, say, the murderous feuds that erupted between drug gangs in Chicago's poorer neighborhoods a few years ago, the violence in Karachi frequently shuts down the city, which is the country's business hub. So the violence is greatly hampering Pakistan's attempts to attract foreign direct investment, which it needs if it's to pull out of its economic slump.

From that viewpoint Pakistan's leaders shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth if India's offering to sell them electricity on an expedited basis. I understand the leaders are boxed in by the Old Guard's longstanding policy on Indian Kashmir, but if they think they can let Pakistan's electrical crises continue for years more, why, they're as blind as Batista was. And so are those in Washington who support the Old Guard.

Washington is looking in the wrong directions in Pakistan, as it did in Cuba, as it did in Iran, as it did in Egypt and so many other places. That's because Washington is always looking for verification of its assumptions. It needs to look for signs arising outside its assumptions; only from such effort can the outline of a lengthening shadow be intuited.

TWO SIGNS

August 26, 2010:

Crush of Refugees Inflames Karachi
By Tom Wright,
The Wall Street Journal

KARACHI, Pakistan - Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Pakistan's devastating floods are seeking shelter in this city of 18 million, exacerbating ethnic strife that has already escalated this year ... The local administration says it is expecting and can cope with up to one million of the refugees. But many others who have made it to Karachi say they are being turned away from shelters on the outskirts and are pouring in to the city, deepening ethnic rivalries with Karachi's majority ethnic community that have simmered for years. ... For Karachi's dominant group, the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs, the influx of Sindhi refugees poses a threat to the established order.

"If they come in hundreds of thousands, how will they survive?" says Khawaja Izhar ul Hassan, a member of the provincial assembly from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, which is largely a Muhajir political party and forms part of Sindh province's ruling coalition government. ...

I'm being unfair to Christian Parenti, the author of the next report I'm featuring here, because I'm omitting much of the first part of his discussion, which focuses on his interest in climate change and its connection to social unrest. Mr Parenti sees the massive flooding in Sindh last year as an example of how climate change is causing massive dislocations in human populations; the first part of his report reflects that view. I've omitted that part for two reasons:

First, even if one assumes for the sake of argument that the weather conditions leading to the flooding were the result of climate change, the destructiveness of the flooding in Sindh was greatly due to human negligence, not the climate. That part of Pakistan is flood prone, which is why the British built an extensive and effective flood management system in the region. The system was allowed to fall into disrepair after Pakistan became an independent nation and no attempt was made to modernize flood management principles. (Parenti's discussion does touch on the issue although I've omitted it here.)

Secondly, it's the major portion of Parenti's investigative work that I find to be vital information -- the best window the general public has on a social upheaval in Pakistan that was touched off the 2010 flooding, but which is rooted in an essentially feudal society coming up against a 'third tier' of urbanization in a developing country.

(In first-tier ubanization the city is a commercial and/or governing hub. In second-tier urbanization large numbers of rural peoples arrive to reside and look for work in the hub as its commerce/government workforce expands. If the wave or waves of arrivals are sudden, driven by catastrophe(s) in the rural regions, this creates third-tier urbanization, which has a refugee or 'displaced persons' component.)

I hope you'll read Parenti's report in its entirety at the Agence Global website (see below); here I've provided enough of it to show that the options provided to the poor by rapid urbanization in Pakistan, which is symbolized by the megacity of Karachi, are now presenting a challenge to the country's ruling class (including the military) that it might not be able to deflect.

June 30, 2011:

Pakistan One Year After the Floods
by Christian Parenti
The Nation (U.S. publication) via Agence Global

Funding for this article was provided by the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Documentary Prize from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Christian Parenti is a contributing editor for The Nation and visiting scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books, June 2011).

KARACHI -- A hot, gritty wind carries the stench of pit latrines across a refugee camp on the western outskirts of Karachi, on Pakistan’s southern-facing coast. In the sky, vultures and eagles circle. At its peak, this camp held 1,400 families, all poor farmers displaced by the Indus floods of 2010, which inundated an area the size of England and affected more than 20 million people.

Before the massive floods of 2010 -- the worst in memory -- much of central and southern Asia was suffering through a brutal ten-year drought, during which crops did poorly and farmers sank ever deeper into debt. Pakistan is considered one of the most arid countries in the world and one of the most water-stressed. The flood was just the latest bit of extreme weather.
[...]
In rural Sindh, the floodwaters have finally receded, but the old problems have not. It is time to plant new crops, but in many refugee camps there are people refusing to go back to the land. At the windswept camp outside Karachi only half the residents have gone home. Aid agencies are cutting off relief, and the government is telling people to leave. Yet many refugees are stubbornly staying put.

“We will die here before we go back to those landlords,” says Mehboob Ali, the camp spokesman.

He and his neighbors seem to mean it. The day before I visited, the camp’s incipient social organization, the Mutasereen ("affected people") Action Committee, marched demanding the right to stay and build houses. Police met the marchers with volleys of tear gas and a baton charge. [...]

Why would desperately poor flood victims fight to stay in a dust-choked tent camp on the outskirts of a violent mega-city rather than go back to their homes?

The answer lies in the horrible exploitation and humiliation that is everyday life for most people in rural Pakistan. In Sindh, the traditional landlords are called zamindars and their tenant farmers are haris. Since independence and partition, in 1947, various Pakistani leaders have attempted land reform, but little has ever been achieved. And so, today the zamindars still own vast tracks of land on which their serflike haris live and work.

Several hundred miles north of Karachi on the edge of Sukkur, where old British-built barrages regulate the flow of the Indus, I found another camp of displaced people who don’t want to move. These people could also be described as escapees from feudalism. The camp lacks a school, a clinic, even basic sanitation, and aid is being cut off. But the remaining residents are finding ways to fit themselves into the local labor market: young men work on construction sites and in granaries and warehouses. Women go to the kachcha -- the wild area along the river -- where they pay armed men for the right to cut wood for resale to restaurants in Sukkur city.

“We don’t want to go back because the landlord will double our debt,” says Hassan Khoso. “We want the government to give us land.” He goes on, “Some poor tenant farmers ran off in the first week of the flood, before the water could even reach their district.”

Such was their desire to flee. Khoso, who’s from near Jacobabad, owed 50,000 rupees (about $560) last year but fears the debt will be 100,000 if he returns. He lost a rice crop worth 30,000 rupees, two water buffalo and two goats. He says that landlords have been coming to the camp urging the haris to return. Khoso and others say that is part of what keeps them close to the city. Along with work, there is access to hospitals and the promise -- at least the promise -- of education for their children.

As at the camp on the western edge of Karachi, these people have formed a camp committee. To make their demands heard they marched to the local press club and held a sit-in. And how are such calls for reform and development being met by officials?
Dead silence.

The floods inundated an area the size of England, destroyed almost 5 million acres of crops, killed about 1,750 people and left 10 million homeless. Rebuilding is expected to take three to five years. Despite the scale of the damage, the discourse around reconstruction involves very little if any public discussion of how things can be improved; ideas like social justice, land reform, climate adaptation or climate justice are missing. Local left parties are marginalized and hounded by landlord thugs.

The reason for this is simple: landlords have too much power. They control the sale of seed and fertilizer, set the prices of crops, rig local elections, imprison in private jails those who oppose them, use village schools to stable their cattle and generally have their own way regarding the people. Their influence on the government is pervasive at all levels.

There has been no pressure for change coming from the US government, which has given Pakistan $18 billion in assistance and payments since 2002. Nor has any [pressure] come from the international NGOs and the UN -- both of which run large aid and development programs here.

When I interviewed a spokeswoman for the UN World Food Program, so diligently did she tiptoe around the sensibilities of the Pakistani government that she refused even to use the word “corruption.”

Oxfam, on the other hand, has launched an investigation into “financial irregularities” within its own flood-relief work.

And so, the haris are bereft of allies or champions. If they want justice they’ll have to get it on their own. But in flood-ravaged Sindh the zamindars have a different plan: they want their haris back.

At the camp on the outskirts of Karachi one landlord from Baluchistan came with five armed guards, threatening to take away several brothers from a family named Bux. All the brothers were in debt to the landlord; he threatened to lock them in his private jail if they did not return and start working. But the camp rallied and faced him down.

All through the Indus flood zone I heard similar stories: landless haris in urban camps preferring to become day laborers rather than return to debt peonage in the districts and landlords complaining that relief aid was keeping the haris away from their obligations.

Standing on an earthen levee along a canal in the village of Arazi in the Dadu district of northern Sindh, a stout landlord named Kahari Bhutto exclaimed, “The farmworkers -- their homes were wiped out, and they are gone. I don’t know where they are. Landowners themselves are having to do the work!”

As the floodwaters receded, Bhutto, like most farmers, threw down a late emergency crop of wheat. Fortunately, the flood had deposited a rejuvenating layer of nutritionally rich river silt, and the emergency wheat crop across Sindh has been very robust, so too some fast-growing sunflowers given out by USAID.

Measures like these have helped offset the damage of the flood. To harvest cotton, says Bhutto, he would normally hire ten to fifteen people, through sharecropping arrangements. But this year he hired only three, and his brother and father also worked. And now, instead of paying 250 rupees per day for labor, he has to pay 500.

When I check at a nearby tent camp full of people who had come from Baluchistan, refugees working as day laborers confirmed that labor prices have indeed gone up. But as one, Mir Mumtaz, explained, the people are in a bind: they do not want to go back to Baluchistan and face their old landlords, nor do they want to enter into sharecropping agreements here in Sindh. “We are afraid of just going into debt again.”

To be clear: although displacement is an escape from debt, it has also meant impoverishment. Khairam Hatar, an older, educated and rather distinguished-looking widow, explained, “I do embroidering here in Dadu town. Before, I had a sewing machine and was able to make money on my own. But I lost that during the flood.” Her sporadic income is a fraction of what it was when she was self-employed in Baluchistan.

Farther up the river in Shikarpur, I meet Mohammad Arif Khan Mahar. A prominent landlord, he was a local politician, and his brother is a member of the provincial parliament. Khan Mahar hosts my traveling companions and me in his attock -- a combination guesthouse/meeting hall away from the family house. In the wide courtyard several neem trees shed their blossoms, which a young male servant sweeps up. Around the courtyard are the bedrooms and several plush meeting rooms. The attock halls are decorated with photographic portraits and decorative swords.

The zamindar has many complaints: the government is corrupt -- “Our officials mismanaged everything. There’s no accountability for state officials, no planning, no organization whatsoever.” The workforce is illiterate -- “Frequently, the labor is useless if the tasks are complex and involve machinery.”

He says that indeed many indebted haris “have run away from their responsibilities.” And though he notes rising tension and criminal violence, he says, “Here, there is no insurgency yet.”

The next day we tour his lands by SUV, accompanied by two armed guards. When the SUV stops and the zamindar steps out to survey the damage, his haris drop their tasks and crowd around him, crouching and bowing as they approach to shake his hand. The thin, sinewy, sun-beaten haris, splattered with mud and straw from brick-making and home-rebuilding contrast sharply with the tall, rotund, relatively pale landlord. Except for the SUV, the guns and the sunglasses, this could be a scene from medieval times.

The rage this inequality creates simmers, then boils over. When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December 2007, much of rural Sindh exploded in riots that had a decidedly class angle: when the flames died down, thirty-four gas stations, eighteen rail stations, hundreds of private cars and shops, and 176 banks had been looted and burned. Just north of here in Punjab some of the haris are gravitating toward a new Punjabi Taliban, which, in rhetoric at least, invoke issues of class exploitation and call for land reform.

What does my host think of land reform? “The government should first give away unused land. Rather than coming after the productive farms just to make a political show.”

In many ways Khan Mahar is progressive, adopting new technologies and, according to his workers, paying much better than most landlords. But he is still a feudal landlord with luxury and power, and wants to keep his vast holdings and the indebted haris who live there. He need not worry: there is no discussion of land reform and no chance it will be attempted.

When I ask about relief in the area, he waves away the question: “They’ve had enough relief!”

During the first weeks of flooding, relief went relatively smoothly. International aid agencies brought supplies, and the military pulled trucks, planes and helicopters out of Kashmir and the war zones of the Federal Administered Tribal Areas to move supplies to stranded populations. But once the emergency was over, the endemic problems of government corruption and the fetters of landlord influence on politics returned. According to Transparency International’s 2010 ranking, only thirty-three nations are more corrupt than Pakistan.

“NGOs hire locals to have some accountability and traction,” says Qadeer Ansari, a manager with the General Services Department of Dadu district, where 60 to 70 percent of houses were damaged.

“But who are these locals? Very often they are just the same old influential people, landlords and their representatives. Nepotism, patronage and corruption shape how relief and reconstruction operate. And often food is simply stolen and sold.”

* * *
[...]
Is there a plan for repairing and managing the increasingly extreme hydrological patterns of the Indus River? Talking with the head of IT, I notice how few computers he has for his department.

“Well,” says the clerk sheepishly, “we really just use these computers as typewriters. Just to print out documents and then pass them around in hard copy.” As we are talking, a messenger is collecting a fourth signature and stamp on a document.

This system -- in which every little petty potentate in every department has to sign off on every document -- is designed to facilitate a culture of bribery. When real planning or technical work is needed, the government outsources these “special projects” to development experts at the World Bank or private firms. As a result, the capacity of the Pakistani state remains malformed and stunted.

Again, the roots of this problem go back to the power of the rural elites. The zamindars systematically crush those who oppose them, preventing the creation of good governance and a literate population because it would undermine their power.
[...]

For more on Pakistan's electricity-shortage crisis, see The Nation's (Pakistan) July 28, 2011 report, No let-up in Karachiites’ sufferings, and Wikipedia's article, Electricity Sector in Pakistan ("Contrary to Pakistani government and expatriate claims, Pakistan suffers from a massive electricity shortage.")

RAND paper: Washington, grow up and admit Pakistani regime won't stop supporting terrorist groups (UPDATED)

UPDATE June 22, 7:30 AM EDT
It turned out the RAND paper was stuck in the carrot-and-stick groove. Disappointing, although it's still worth reading.
*********************
Meanwhile, countless anti-government riots are breaking out everywhere in Pakistan ....

Last weekend it was Matt Waldman's paper for the Crisis States Research Center at the London School of Economics which concluded that Pakistan's ISI supported Taliban terrorist organizations as a matter of official policy. Now comes a paper from the RAND think tank that harps on the same theme but broadens it to include the entire Pakistani government. According to an AP report filed by Anne Gearan around midnight EDT:

WASHINGTON — Pakistan hasn't quit its habit of courting insurgents, and extremist networks with current or former ties to the government pose a significant risk to the United States and Pakistan's elected government itself, a new study concludes.

A rising number of terrorist plots in the United States with roots in Pakistan stems in part from an unsuccessful strategy by the U.S.-backed government in Pakistan to blunt the influence of militant groups in the country, the report by the RAND Corp. said.

The report, to be issued Monday, says the May 1 failed car bombing in New York's Times Square is an example of how militant groups, some with shadowy government backing, can increasingly export terrorism far beyond the country's borders.

The United States isn't getting its money's worth for all the billions in aid pledged to the strategically located, nuclear-armed nation, the report concludes. The U.S. should withhold some aid until Pakistan makes "discernible progress," authors Seth Jones of RAND and C. Christine Fair of Georgetown University wrote.
[...]

Matt Waldman had somehow arrived at the idea that 'solving' Kashmir would make a tiger change its stripes. From the rest of the AP report it seems the RAND recommendations are more in line with the ones I made in January, which amount to carefully disengaging from Pakistan as much as possible.

The Pakistanis really don't like being treated like donkeys, so the civilian government and military have not responded well to Washington's carrot-and-stick approach. And I suspect President Asif Ali Zardari's view of President Obama is, 'If you're so smart why aren't you rich?'

Zardari is worth $1.8 billion; he's the second richest Pakistani, and that figure is just what he's declared, not what his fortune is actually worth. Now one may argue and many have that no small part of his wealth comes from corrupt deals but in that part of the world how one got the money is nowhere near as important as having it. I think that attitude explains at least in part why whatever Obama and his envoys tell Zardari goes in one ear and out the other.

As to the tactic of putting more pressure on Pakistan's military, which controls the ISI, that strikes me as naive. From a 2008 report titled, Pakistan Tries To Clean Up ISI Image By Shutting Down Political Wing

In his latest book, "Descent Into Chaos," [Ahmed] Rashid argues that the ISI has set up a series of private organizations in order to put more distance into the relationship between its military leadership and extremist fighters. He says the private organizations are staffed by retired ISI officers and funded through the budget of Pakistan's Frontier Corps.

So that's what tough love gets you in Pakistan: more Three Card Monte.

I think the same observation applies to the effort by Washington to refurbish Pakistan's Intelligence Bureau, which has a domestic focus in the manner of Britain's MI5. Writing in April for Rediff, Indian intelligence analyst B. Raman reported:

The US has also been encouraging the demilitarisation of the IB and the process of the restoration of civilian preeminence in the internal intelligence and security setup of Pakistan. It has increased the allocation of funds for the IB and has been helping it in other ways too for making it once again a professional intelligence organisation run by civilians as it used to be before 1971. The US sees in the strengthening of the IB one way of reducing the negative role of the ISI in Pakistan.[...]

There is some urgency, unrelated to the NATO campaign in Afghanistan, for the ISAF and Washington in particular to straighten out their thinking on Pakistan. Of course it would be the leftists at Canada's Global Research who came up with news about Pakistan that's has been kept out of the American press. The country is beginning to resemble China in that countless anti-government riots are breaking out everywhere:

(July 19) “The military is the muscle that protects the ruling elite from the wrath of the people,” says Pakistani political analyst Dr. Mubashir Hassan. “Right now, people are out on the street; blocking roads, attacking railway stations, etc. If you read the papers, it seems as though a general uprising has started all over Pakistan.”

Dr. Hassan says that sporadic outbursts of anger in Pakistan won’t coalesce into a people’s revolution anytime soon. The demonstrators are too disorganized. But, the sheer volume of daily protests shows that many sectors of Pakistani society have pressing needs and priorities that do not include enlistment as foot soldiers in a proxy force for the United States’ War on Terror.

Dr. Hassan, a co-founder of the People’s Party of Pakistan, is a respected scholar and statesman. Last year, when we met with him, he had just returned from a visit, in the U.S., with Professors Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, his contemporaries in seeking to build just and fair social structures. Last month, in Lahore, he spoke with us about U.S. interference in the region and changing dynamics in Pakistan.

A snapshot of unrest in Pakistan offers a framework for outsiders to understand why it is unfair to insist that Pakistan “do more” to fulfill the United States’ vision for fighting extremism. It may also suggest why strong anti-American sentiments prevail, in Pakistan, among the peasantry, the middle class, religious and secular groups, and the highly educated and privileged classes.

Throughout the past several months, demonstrators burned tires nearly every day in the streets of Karachi, Rawalpindi, Lahore and other population centers as they voiced their opposition to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and it’s insistence on the implementation of a Value Added Tax (VAT) along with a proposed 11.3 billion dollar bailout package.

In a special meeting convened by the Farmers Association of Pakistan, (FAP), participants said that the VAT would “totally kill the farmers and cause irreparable damage to the agriculture sector by making inputs more expensive. This would, in turn, increase the prices of agriculture produce, adding to the miseries of both the farmer and consumer, who are already facing extreme economic depression.”

Ashraf Javed, writing for [Pakistan's] The Nation, reported that economic experts estimated that the IMF and the Pakistani government’s original plan for the VAT would increase the prices of over 122 major categories of items, including food, by at least 15 percent.

These proposed policies led to protests by the All Pakistan Organization of Small Traders and Cottage Industries, the Pakistan Muslim League, Jamaat-e-Islami, textile workers, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, and even spawned a nationwide mobile phone boycott.

Because of the immense pressure put on the government to reject the VAT, Pakistan decided to postpone implementation of the tax from July to October. The government, under the leadership of the People’s Party of Pakistan, has also come up with plans to incorporate many of the IMF’s demands for the VAT into the General Sales Tax (GST), which already sits at about 16 percent.

In response, the IMF has threatened to freeze future disbursements coming to Pakistan if the VAT is not implemented by July 1st along with a “power tariff,” or 6 percent increase in electricity rates.

As the IMF and World Bank are insisting on a 6 percent hike in electricity rates, there has been nationwide upheaval over increased “load shedding,” the term for scheduled power outages in Pakistan, which sometimes last for 10-12 hours per day. Protests against the power cuts, often quite militant, have consistently erupted in major cities like Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. Demonstrators in other provinces and cities including Hyderabad, Multan, Quetta, Bahawalnagar, Sukkur, Badin, Mirpur Khas, Larkana, Thatta and Ghotki, Dera Ismail Khan, Hangu, Kurk, Swat and Muzaffarabad have also registered their outrage.

Textile mills, manufacturers, the agricultural sector and traders are among the hardest hit by load shedding which limits the hours of operation, disrupting production and interfering with worker schedules. Protesters have created roadblocks, burned tires, gone on strike and organized massive sit-ins.

In Punjab, Pakistan’s most densely populated province, the Tenants Association of Punjab, (AMP), demands “Ownership or Death.” Involving 1 million landless tenants, based in villages stretching over 15 districts, AMP is one of Pakistan’s largest political movements. For ten years, the AMP has struggled to secure ownership rights for poor families that have tilled their land for over four generations. [...]

If the IMF carries through with its threat, you could see another 'Burma' because in Karachi, the country's largest city, the poor already have their backs to the wall. Because of the 'water mafia,' they're forced to pay exorbitant amounts for water. From Alex Rodriguez's heartbreaking report for the Los Angeles Times titled, Karachi 'water mafia' leaves Pakistanis parched and broke:

Corrupt politicians allow businessmen to siphon off as much as 41% of the city's water supply and turn around and sell it at exorbitant rates to residents, generating an estimated $43 million a year. [Pundita note: for context, $1 = about 85 Pakistani rupees]

(KARACHI) Name a cash cow in this sprawling city of ragged slums and glass-walled office buildings and it's almost certain there's an organized crime syndicate behind it. The illegal operations, routinely referred to as mafias, are everywhere. There's a land mafia that commandeers prime real estate, a sugar mafia that conspires to control sugar prices, and even a railway mafia that forges train tickets and pilfers locomotive parts.

For those on the city's bottom rung, however, the underworld entity they revile the most is the water tanker mafia, a network of trucking firms that teams up with corrupt bureaucrats to turn water into liquid gold worth tens of millions of dollars each year.

The water tanker mafia's prey can be found in slums like Karachi's Gulshan-Sikanderabad neighborhood, where every morning people buy water from the tankers, lug the plastic jugs back to their homes on wooden carts, then come back three or four more times in the afternoon and evening to buy more.

A family that makes $100 a month can spend as much as a quarter of that on water, which, elsewhere in Pakistan, costs pennies and flows out of household taps.

Water scarcity isn't the cause. Karachi has a steady water supply, and it has the network of pipes to pump ample water into every neighborhood, rich and poor.

But Karachi is also a city of opportunists forever on the prowl for under-the-table wealth. As municipal officials look the other way, businessmen illegally tap water mains, and use the makeshift hydrants to supply fleets of tankers that then sell water to businesses, factories and neighborhoods at inflated prices. As many as 272 million gallons a day are siphoned off by the trucks.[...]

Unlike the way Burmese see their military, the vast majority (around 86 percent) of Pakistanis greatly admire their military. But if the military has to quell riots by millions of desperate people, the respect would vanish very quickly.

The Burma protests were touched off because Burma's junta, following IMF orders, jacked up the price of fuel more than 100 percent; like falling dominoes that skyrocketed the cost of food and transportation. People were starving and they couldn't afford the increased fares for buses, etc. to get to work The street protests that followed ended in a military crackdown that set off a bloodbath.

However, the junta did not depend on Western largesse for support so they could afford to shrug off world opinion. That wouldn't be the case for Pakistan's military, which could find itself in a vise.

The authors of the Global Research report (Josh Brollier and Kathy Kelly) observed:

With 60 million people living in poverty and many more living just above the poverty line, the people of Pakistan have priorities that do not include acting as a proxy to fight U.S. wars against purported terrorists.

For many people, including those like Muhammad Akbar, a desperate rickshaw driver who committed suicide on Wednesday due to prolonged financial hardships, these priorities may be simply to put food on the table and to provide for their families. [...] People in the United States wishing to show solidarity with Pakistanis struggling to make ends meet should try to dialogue with Pakistani-led grassroots movements.[...]

The United States government has been doing just the opposite: funneling aid to government administrations in Pakistan that are corrupt when they're not being wasteful. The U.S. did it again this weekend:

ISLAMABAD, Jun 19 (Associated Press Pakistan)

United States on Saturday announced to increase humanitarian assistance for affected areas in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhawa Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas(FATA). Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who is on a three-day visit to Pakistan pledged an additional $11.1 million in humanitarian assistance for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA.

According to US embassy, out of the total pledge, $4 million will be directed through the World Health Organization for provision of life-saving health services [...]
The United States has contributed $173.9 million in humanitarian assistance to Pakistan in 2010.

And yet the more aid Washington gives to Pakistan, the more U.S. intentions are met with suspicion and hatred. It's gotten to the point where Pakistanis are blaming everything wrong in their country on the USA. That's a tinder-box situation, which could explode this summer under severe economic pressures.

Meanwhile, the United States has a war to fight. The RAND paper is arriving on the heels of five pieces of bad news from last week:

1. June 15

Militant Group Expands Attacks in Afghanistan

By Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times

(KABUL, Afghanistan) — A Pakistani-based militant group identified with attacks on Indian targets has expanded its operations in Afghanistan, inflicting casualties on Afghans and Indians alike, setting up training camps, and adding new volatility to relations between India and Pakistan.

The group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is believed to have planned or executed three major attacks against Indian government employees and private workers in Afghanistan in recent months, according to Afghan and international intelligence officers and diplomats here. It continues to track Indian development workers and others for possible attack, they said.

Lashkar was behind the synchronized attacks on several civilian targets in Mumbai, India, in 2008, in which at least 163 people were killed. Its inroads in Afghanistan provide a fresh indication of its growing ambitions to confront India even beyond the disputed territory of Kashmir, for which Pakistan’s military and intelligence services created the group as a proxy force decades ago.

Officially, Pakistan says it no longer supports or finances the group. But Lashkar’s expanded activities in Afghanistan, particularly against Indian targets, prompt suspicions that it has become one of Pakistan’s proxies to counteract India’s influence in the country.

They provide yet another indicator of the extent to which Pakistani militants are working to shape the outcome of the Afghan war as the July 2011 deadline approaches to begin withdrawing American troops.
[...]

2. June 16

Pakistan funds Lashkar-e-Taiba in Punjab

By Bill Roggio, Long War Journal

Here is an excellent reason why upping Pakistan's aid from about $500 million a year to $1.5 billion a year was and still is a terrible idea. Last year, the provincial government of Punjab handed over $951,000 to Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the thinly veiled front group for Hafiz Saeed's Lashkar-e-Taiba. This is the same group that launched the Mumbai assault in November 2008 and has participated in numerous raids against US forces in eastern Afghanistan. [...]

Note the financial backing for the LeT front organization is not coming from the ISI.

3. June 16

U.S. showed Pakistan evidence on militant faction

(Reuters) - The United States has presented evidence to Pakistan about the growing threat and reach of a militant faction which Washington suspects has ties to Pakistani intelligence, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
World

In the presentations, U.S. military leaders provided Pakistan's army chief with information detailing the role of the Haqqani network in a string of increasingly brazen bombings, including one last month targeting the main NATO air base at Bagram in Afghanistan.

Washington has long pressed Islamabad to crack down on the Haqqanis in the North Waziristan tribal zone bordering Afghanistan, who are closely aligned with the Taliban, but U.S. officials acknowledge it is a hard sell because of resistance within Pakistani intelligence.

General David Petraeus, who oversees the Afghan war as head of U.S. Central Command, told a congressional hearing the Haqqanis had "transnational" ambitions, suggesting they could try to strike beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Washington has issued similar warnings about the growing reach of the Pakistani Taliban, which investigators blame for a botched May 1 car bomb in New York's Time Square.

There are strategic reasons for Pakistan's hesitancy to attack the Haqqanis, a faction which some in Islamabad see as a strategic asset that will give them influence in any eventual settlement to the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
[...]

4. News that the Pakistani-American Times Square Bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was paid $12,000 by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan's (TTP) to carry out the plot. India's Hindustan Times noted archly:

It is worth mentioning here that the US officials and analysts had initially brushed off the TTP's claim of a connection to the May 1 botched terror attempt, as it did not consider it a 'trans-national group', however, the growing evidence showcased the lengthening reach of Pakistan-based militants.

5. In public, at least, General David Petraeus hedged about the findings of the LSE paper. June 20, Sify:

[...] Speaking during a congressional hearing earlier this week, General David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander overseeing America's war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he doesn't approve the conclusion of the LSE's report "in all respects".

"Well, first of all, I don't want to imply that I would accept the London School of Economics study or the individual who wrote that for them, his conclusions in all respects," General Petraeus said.

The LSE's report had claimed that supporting the Afghan Taliban was the "official policy" of the ISI.

Although General Petraeus acknowledged that "some of those ties continue in various forms", he said that such links were useful too.

"Some of them, by the way, gathering intelligence ... you have to have contact with bad guys to get intelligence on bad guys. And so it's very important, I think, again, to try to have this kind of nuance feel for what is really going on," The Dawn quoted General Petraeus, as saying.

"I do believe that the Pakistanis - the people, the leaders, the clerics, and the military - all recognise that you cannot allow poisonous snakes to have a nest in your backyard. Even if the tacit agreement is that they're going to bite the neighbour's kids instead of yours, eventually they turn around and bite you and your kids," he added.

According to the LSE's report, which is said to be based on interviews with nine Afghan Taliban commanders, the ISI is providing funds, training and sanctuary to the Taliban on a scale much larger than previously thought. [...]

Pakistan: Rawalpindi's frankensteins dig into Karachi

Karachi, Pakistan, one of the world's megacities

Today's Washington Post features a report that Militant factions with global aims are spreading roots throughout Pakistan and that they're already represented in force in Karachi. The news makes a companion piece to Rashid Ahmed's grim warning today at the BBC that the Taliban are preparing to return in force to Swat Valley and FATA.

However, the hinterlands is one thing; Karachi is a megacity -- number 10 in the world in 2007, the last available ranking -- and one of the fastest growing cities in the world.

A bay city, Karachi is spread over more than a thousand square miles; it is Pakistan's center of banking, industry, and trade, and home to the country's largest corporations. And yet the city is also a magnet for terrorist and insurgent groups.

So while CIA chief Leon Panetta claimed last year that drone strikes in Waziristan were "the only game in town" in the fight against al Qaeda, the game has driven many foreign and local militants to take refuge in a megacity, where U.S. drone strikes would create so much anti-government feeling that martial law would have to be declared.

As to whether martial law could be enforced -- Pakistan's military might not want to find out, and neither might Bejing or the World Bank, which have been bankrolling extensions and improvements of Karachi's port facilities. The geographic position of Karachi places the port in close proximity to major shipping routes, such as the Strait of Hormuz.

Although the analogy is limited Karachi is beginning to remind me of Beirut, where Hezbollah garnered enough power and sympathy to face down the central government. The same situation looms in Karachi, where the Pakistani Taliban have provided social services to the poor and are considered heroes by many Pakistanis.

Granted, Lebanon's military is not in the same league as Pakistan's. But the question is whether the Pak military would want risk starting a civil war on behalf of a civilian government that's not trusted by the populace.

On the other hand, the international banks and foreign governments that keep Pakistan's head above water wouldn't like to deal with the sticky wicket of an overt military dictatorship returning to power in the country.

Would the tiebreaker be the fig leaf of U.N. peacekeepers in Karachi while the U.S. military does the heavy lifting in the background?

Here is the Post report, written by Karin Brulliard and Pamela Constable of the Washington Post Foreign Service:

KARACHI, PAKISTAN -- Terrorism suspect Faisal Shahzad's alleged path to Times Square reflects what experts say is a militant support network that spans Pakistan and is eager to shepherd aspiring terrorists from around the globe.

In this teeming southern metropolis, authorities are focusing on a domestic militant outfit that might have escorted Shahzad to distant northern peaks where U.S. investigators allege he received training with the al-Qaeda-affiliated Pakistani Taliban. In Pakistan's heartland, extremist organizations freely build compounds and campaign with politicians, while their foot soldiers fight alongside the Taliban in the borderlands, intelligence officials say.

The overall picture is one of a jumbled scaffolding of militancy that supports al-Qaeda and the Taliban with money and safe houses, and can provide entrance tickets to mountain training camps for aspiring terrorists, one U.S. counterterrorism official said.

Although the planners of most serious terror plots against the West in recent years have received direction or training from groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, the reach of extremist organizations across Pakistan underscores the limits of Pakistani military offensives and of U.S. airstrikes that target the Taliban and al-Qaeda only along the frontier.

"Our cells are working everywhere," one Pakistani Taliban fighter said in a telephone interview. New foreign recruits, among them Europeans and Americans, undergo days of isolation and "complete observation" by militants outside the tribal areas before gaining access to camps, he said.

Many such aspirants do not make it, the Taliban fighter said, because they are deemed to be spies. That happened to five Northern Virginia men, who were rebuffed by Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-i-Taiba last year despite the reference of an online recruiter, according to Pakistani authorities. However, those aspirants deemed sincere represent a "one in a million" opportunity for militants to strike in the West, said Masood Sharif Khattak, a former Pakistani Intelligence Bureau chief.

Their first stop is typically not the mountains of Waziristan, where Shahzad told U.S. investigators he had trained, but 1,000 miles south in Karachi, the Taliban fighter said.

An Arabian Sea gateway of 18 million people, the city is awash in weapons and dotted with mosques where, police say, jihadist literature is freely distributed and clerics deliver vitriolic anti-American sermons. Among them is the Bath'ha mosque and seminary, an unassuming building known locally as a bastion for Jaish-e-Mohammed, a banned Kashmir-focused group. Authorities said they have arrested a man at the mosque who escorted Shahzad to the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Operatives from Pakistan's array of jihadist groups find haven in Karachi's multiethnic sprawl; Afghan Taliban deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was arrested in the city earlier this year.

The groups form a nexus, according to recent local intelligence reports. One report, obtained by The Washington Post, warns of coordinated plans by the Pakistani Taliban -- a group based in the tribal areas that has focused its attacks inside Pakistan -- and the traditionally anti-India militant groups of Punjab province. The target: NATO supply convoys in Karachi.

Farther north in the expanse of Punjab, experts say the major anti-India militant groups and other radical Sunni organizations need little cover: They are tolerated and even supported by the state. Banned groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed have formed organizations with new names that operate freely. Some of their leaders have been arrested for alleged links to terrorist attacks, then released by the courts.

The groups have in recent years increasingly focused attacks within Punjab as provincial officials have tried to placate them, both to capitalize on their popularity and in hopes of moderating their views.

"These groups have not been touched," said Ahmed Rashid, a leading Pakistani expert on the Taliban and Islamist extremism. "They have been through a metamorphosis and turned their guns inward and linked up with other groups in the northwest, but no one is acknowledging it. The word is out that if you hang with them, you're safe."

The counterinsurgency tactics used in the tribal areas -- missiles and military operations -- are widely thought to be unfeasible in Pakistan's populous mainland. But critics say Pakistani police, security agencies and officials could at least start to clamp down on extremist organizations by vocally condemning them, monitoring mosques and madrassas and denying public space and private property to militant-linked groups.

Pakistan says it is still investigating the extent of Shahzad's militant links; some security officials have said that he definitely had ties to Jaish-e-Mohammed. Terrorism analyst Muhammad Amir Rana said that what appears to be a lack of political will to tackle militant organizations in Pakistan's heartland is actually rooted in a problem with far greater implications for the global battle against terror: The groups' reach and presence in cities has made them a beast that cannot easily be dismantled.

"It's very complex," Rana said. "They have infrastructure in all different areas."

Constable reported from Lahore. Staff writer Joby Warrick in Washington and special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report