Karachi violence unending

The targeted operation in Karachi has entered its eighth month but the killings in the city continue to fluctuate. After seeing relatively peaceful days, the past week witnessed once again a significant rise in drive-by shootings and targeted attacks on lawyers and doctors, among others. While the victims were mostly apolitical, their deaths are claimed by one sectarian party or another, only to have rival members gunned down in the following days.

For the people of Karachi, there is nothing new in this vicious cycle of violence — the lives here are so cheap that they can be taken away for belonging to a certain ethnicity or sect, and now for belonging to a certain profession. If this trend continues, we will see fewer and fewer professionals willing to work in the country. As it is, brain drain — the outflow of educated men and women leaving for developed countries — is a problem in Pakistan. If lawyers, doctors and educationists are not given protection, then the ones that remain will also leave.

What makes the situation dismal is the poor response from the law-enforcement agencies. While the high-ranking police officials make tall claims of the number of arrests they make every day, they have little to show when it comes to reducing crimes. To make it worse, the law-enforcement agencies are still caught in the age-old habit of blaming everything on a ubiquitous ‘third force’. This factor, though a mystery, takes the blame whenever things go out of hand.

What is needed by the law-enforcement agencies now is a commitment to accept responsibility of the crimes that take place within their jurisdiction and take proper steps to control them. They must recruit competent officials on a non-political basis and make sure they work independently, without influence from politicians and other bureaucrats. The political parties must also be taken on board to rid their ranks of all criminal elements. Only if there is a genuine commitment on the part of the law enforcers will Karachi witness change in the true sense.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17^th, 2014.

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