Earlier:

“Canadian tragedy in Afghanistan”/Pak Update

Now yet more conflict in Pakistan you may not be aware of; the country does face challenges:

Karachi’s Melting Pot Boils Over

The desperate plight of over 20 million Pakistani citizens displaced and dispossessed by the most ferocious flooding in the history of the young state is heartbreaking.  Nature is extracting a cruel price on a population already racked by debilitating poverty and a brutal insurgency.

But at the same time, too little attention is being paid to the violent drama being played out in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi.  The crippling violence of political party gangsterism between Karachi’s two dominant parties – the Awami National Party (ANP) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) – is alarming, especially as the parties align with organized criminal groups and become increasingly indistinguishable from them. Unlike the flooding, this crisis was avoidable and man-made…

…it is mindboggling that at this juncture of extreme humanitarian tragedy throughout Pakistan and grave strategic consequence in Afghanistan, rival political parties in Pakistan are engaged in blood-curdling street warfare that has virtually shut down a city.  Targeted political and sectarian assassinations in Karachi have already taken the lives of over 100 citizens in recent weeks, and the terror continues…

Karachi is dominated by two ethnically based political parties who are also currently part of Pakistan’s governing coalition — the Awami National Party (ANP), a secular Pashtun based party; and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), consisting of Urdu-speaking descendents of the émigrés from India at the time of partition in 1947 [the Muhajirs, the only Pakistanis for whom Urdu is their mother tongue].  Intensified Taliban violence in Pashtun areas of the north has accelerated the movement of Pashtuns into Karachi, placing Karachi’s longer-term resident MQM Urdu speakers in pitched competition with the wave of Pashtun newcomers.

The relationship between these two dominant groups is bound to turn even more toxic with the next round of local elections, postponed by Pakistan’s flood crisis. Political party rivalry defined by ethnically based gang warfare is no basis for a stable cohesive national identity…

One might well say that. And for some Great Gaming:

USA welcomes Russia’s cooperation with Afghanistan, Pakistan

Romania shows its support for the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan

While BruceR. at Flit looks to Hollywood for, er, guidance:

I wouldn’t agree that The Magnificent Seven is a perfect allegory for Afghanistan…

It’s also fair to say if the West had viewed the Taliban with a mental model something like Calveras’ bandidos in mind, as opposed to seeing them as foot soldiers in SPECTRE/KAOS/whatever-International-Terror-Conspiracy-you-care-to-name (a model that is arguably less close to the truth, but makes them seem much more threatening to us personally) we might have approached this whole situation differently much earlier.

Update:  “Bandidos” maybe, but of a particularly gruesome and often fanatical sort; at least the bandidos current, also very gruesome indeed, are not trying to take over the state…yet?  Terry Glavin on the moral vacuity of worrying about “the militarization of humanitarian aid” since “The Taliban will kill you anyway”. Worth a very good read, from a very good writer:

A Warning To The War-Weary World: Just Watch What Your ‘Peace’ Will Bring You.

If we (the West) had approached the situation differently, if the US had done more after 2001, if many more NATO members had been willing actually to fight and to send truly large numbers of troops after 2004, things would very likely not have come to this pass.

Mr Glavin quotes from Steve Coll’s excellent book on Afstan, Ghost Wars; I would also highly recomment Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos for an excellent continuation of the…Choose your word.

Upperdate: We return to BruceR. for more Afghan realities:

One of the better uses of the Wikileaks data to date, here [Uppestdate: Watch the video here, please--more superb visualisation here, Napoleon's troops in Russia]. For those who still haven’t figured out that this has been a war of the Afghan south and east, and much less so the north and west, hopefully this could be illuminating.

PS: Happy Afghan Independence Day!

Mark
Ottawa