Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s latest vague and controversial anti-U.S. remarks were puzzling to many people both inside and outside Afghanistan, as they implied that the United States is inadvertently colluding with the Taliban.  Despite the fact that he later accused the media of misinterpreting his comments and tried to clarify his remarks during a press conference with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Kabul, his comments generated a lot of noise, confusion, and varied interpretations by political commentators.

The most popular interpretations explained that Karzai’s bizarre remarks were likely aimed at cementing his patriotic image.  Others believed his comments were attempts to rebuild his legacy as he nears the end of his term in office.  Some speculated that they were a result of “bad advice” from his political cronies.

All of these interpretations may have shades of truth to them, yet there is another unnoticed nuance to Karzai’s remarks.  Karzai is displaying his influence over the U.S. because of two important matters: peace talks with the Taliban and the 2014 presidential elections.

With regard to the peace talks, Karzai wants to take the lead on the process, undermine any existing secret negotiation channels that have excluded him, and at a minimum, reduce Kabul’s dependence on Pakistan’s cooperation for the success of any future peace talks.  Having felt excluded from the “secret channels” allegedly opened by the United States to hold negotiations with the Taliban, Karzai also wants the Taliban to know that approaching the Americans for peace talks will end up nowhere if his government is not involved.  

To be able to dominate the political landscape, Karzai needed to showcase his power and authority to the Taliban and counter the militants’ long-running accusations that he is a “powerless” “puppet” of the Americans and that he does not have authority over major decisions in the country  So he staged the recent political drama by ratcheting up his demands on the transfer of the Parwan Detention Facility from the U.S. military to the Afghan government and the expulsion of U.S. Special Forces from parts of Wardak province.  He also stepped up his anti-U.S. rhetoric to ensure his demands were met despite widespread opposition from influential political and social groups in the country.  To add weight to his demands, he even involved the Council of Religious Scholars, a body widely considered to be a tool for advancing Karzai’s personal political goals.  While he achieved both demands, it was a political gamble that brought Afghan-U.S. relations to their lowest point in the last decade.  Yet for Karzai, the end result was that he managed to display his authority and influence over a major international player, though it has yet to produce any breakthroughs in terms of holding direct talks with the Taliban.

The second issue on Karzai’s mind is the 2014 presidential election.  He is constitutionally barred from running for another term, and the Afghan president knows well that his survival and his family’s and clan’s statuses in post-2014 Afghanistan depend on whomever becomes the next leader of the country.  Karzai’s anti-U.S. rhetoric and what it achieved will reinforce his position as a “Kingmaker” in the upcoming elections.  This is likely to mobilize powerbrokers around him and make it easier for his handpicked candidate to win the election because in Afghanistan, the perception of power is more important than actual power.

For Karzai, having a handpicked successor who ensures the continuation of his and his family’s interest and political survival is more a matter of necessity than choice.  This is because, in the incredible tale of Afghan history, many rulers of the country and their families have either been brutally killed or have faced permanent exile in foreign lands.  This unfortunate historical precedent has become even more prominent as five out of nine Afghan leaders and their immediate families have been murdered since the Communist revolution in 1978.  For Karzai, the stakes are even higher if he loses power or if he becomes politically irrelevant.  After all, members of the Karzai family and tribe have enjoyed incredible riches and political domination of southern Afghanistan over the last 12 years, sometimes at the cost of other tribes and political rivals.  Since 2001, his relatives and tribe have ruled the south of the country–where Afghan kings have historically hailed from–more like the Sopranos of Kandahar than the Kennedys of Afghanistan.  

With the Afghan election date fast approaching, the United States should expect more such erratic statements from Karzai.  But they should also understand that Karzai’s anti-U.S. statements neither reflect nor speak for the wider Afghan public view of the United States.  In fact, Karzai was taken aback by the harsh criticism he faced from majority in the country, including members of his own government.  This backlash stemmed from the anxiety that has gripped the country over the widespread belief that a premature withdrawal of the U.S.-led NATO troops will mark the beginning of a civil war in the country.  Many Afghans see their leader’s frantic and bizarre statements as not only damaging to the national interests of the country, but also further throwing the country into the arms of Afghanistan’s two rapacious neighbors: Pakistan and Iran. 

Najib Sharifi is the Director of Afghanistan New Generation Organization—a youth empowerment body based in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Ahmad Shafi is an Afghan journalist and a former NPR producer.

Sectarian violence is raging in Pakistan, and some commentators are now describing the relentless assaults on Shia Muslims as genocide. Predictably, many observers fear that this unrest-coupled with a dangerous overall security situation-could delay Pakistan's May 11 national elections.

It's an understandable, yet ultimately misplaced, concern. As was recently pointed out, Pakistan has held elections under much more trying conditions-including one in Swat in 2008, during the height of the Pakistani Taliban's insurgency there.

Few commentators, however, are talking about another possible impact of sectarian strife on the elections: Shias-roughly 20 percent of the Pakistani population-mobilizing en masse to vote the ruling political party out of power.

Their motivations would be obvious. Shias-like Ahmadis, Christians, and other religious minorities in Pakistan-are incensed at the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) for failing to protect them, and for taking no meaningful action against those who terrorize them. In the blunt words of Abdul Khaliq Hazara, a prominent Hazara Shia in Quetta who heads the Hazara Democratic Party, "the government doesn't have the will to go after them."

Under this scenario, who would the Shia vote for? Probably not the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)-Pakistan's chief opposition party and the current favorite to lead the next governing coalition. The PML-N's bastion is in Punjab Province, which is also the home base of some of Pakistan's most vicious sectarian extremist groups, including the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Yet instead of confronting the LeJ, the PML-N is seemingly courting it. Last year, the law minister of Punjab's provincial government (led by the PML-N) campaigned with the leader of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), LeJ's parent organization. And just days ago, the secretary general of Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ)-like the LeJ, a splinter group of SSP- bragged: "We have thousands of voters in almost every constituency of the South and Central Punjab and the PML-N leadership is destined to knock at our doors when the elections come."

Rumors have abounded that, with the election in mind, the PML-N is negotiating a "seat-adjustment" agreement with ASWJ. (The Express Tribune, in an article later removed from its website, described the deal as follows: the PML-N will support the ASWJ in races for three National Assembly seats, while in return the ASWJ, "whose votes often play a vital role in helping candidates win," will withdraw its candidates from contesting about a dozen National Assembly seats in Punjab) Last month the PML-N denied the rumors-only to be contradicted just days later by SSP's leader. Regardless of who's telling the truth, the PML-N has done little to dispel the expectation that, if it leads the next government, it will do little to address the Shias' plight.

A more likely choice for the Shias might be voting for Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. The PTI, more so than the PML-N or PPP, has gone out of its way to condemn the country's sectarian bloodshed and its chief instigators. Pakistani analysts have contrasted Khan's strong and unequivocal denunciations with the "obfuscations and meaningless remarks" uttered by the Pakistani government. After an LeJ bombing killed nearly 90 people in a Quetta market last month, Khan declared at a press conference: "I tell you by name, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi...there can be no bigger enemy of Islam than you." He also accused the LeJ of exhibiting "the worst kind of enmity towards Islam." Such strong language is rarely used by the PPP or PML-N. In January, Khan even endorsed Shia demands for targeted operations against religious militants.

Admittedly, the PTI has no plans to take aim at the root causes of sectarian violence. For example, reforming-much less repealing-Pakistan's blasphemy laws (which are often used as a pretext to persecute religious minorities) is a move no political party in Pakistan dares make; the late Punjab governor Salman Taseer was assassinated for merely criticizing them. Nonetheless, compared to the two major parties, the PTI gives the impression of genuinely caring about, and wanting to help, Pakistan's besieged minorities (along with other vulnerable segments of the population; the party recently released a new manifesto to protect the disabled). Tellingly, after an attack on a Quetta snooker hall targeting Hazara Shias left more than 100 dead in January, Khan visited the victims' grieving families-a meeting that occurred before the arrival of Pakistani government officials. Shias in Lahore and other areas of Punjab-home to 148 of Pakistan's 272 national assembly seats-could cause significant damage to the PML-N's electoral prospects if they vote as a bloc for the PTI. 

But there's little reason to believe Pakistan's Shias will actually turn out in droves to vote for the PTI. Many Shias are suspicious of Khan because of his support for talks with the Taliban and other gestures perceived as sympathetic to religious militants. Such suspicions intensify when PTI officials (including party vice chairman Ajaz Chaudhry) share the stage with hardline Islamist figures-including members of the ASWJ-during rallies of the Pakistan Defense Council, a collective of conservative religious parties. A recent video produced by the Shia rights group ShiaKilling.com captures the contempt that Pakistani Shias harbor toward the PTI (and toward the PML-N as well). One Shia cleric (who does not appear to enjoy a large following) has even peddled an elaborate conspiracy theory involving Saudi Arabia and the ISI colluding to install Khan as the leader of a new "Saudi-Wahhabi Islamic State" of Pakistan.

There's also little reason to believe Shias will band together and vote en masse for any other political party. Formal research on Pakistani Shia voting patterns is limited, but based on informal conversations and anecdotal evidence, it's safe to say that such patterns are far from monolithic. On May 11, some will vote along ethnic lines. Others will opt for the PPP; in a by-election last year in the Punjab city of Multan, the PPP candidate triumphed-and analysts noted that he earned Shia votes (in fact, according to research by Andrew Wilder, Shias in Punjab tended to vote for the PPP as far back as the 1990s -because of the perception that it was more liberal and tolerant of religious minorities than were other parties). Others still will vote for the MQM. This is a party that has controlled Karachi politics for decades-and has traditionally received many Shia votes (though given Karachi's violent political culture, many of them were probably cast under pressure). Some will simply choose a sympathetic patron. Finally, many Shias-due to fear, apathy, or sheer disgust-probably won't vote at all.

This isn't to say Shias aren't joining forces to pursue political goals. Last November, a top official with the Majlis-e-Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM), a collaborative of Pakistani Shia religious scholars, announced that the organization would be establishing a Shia Solidarity Council "to promote harmony" among the country's Shias. The MWM, he added, "has been making all-out efforts to unite all Shia parties of Pakistan at one platform." (MWM party leaders, incidentally, have also said they seek to "counter [the] nefarious designs of the imperialist forces" against Pakistan, and the MWM has staged U.S. flag-burnings in front of the American embassy in Islamabad.)

Several weeks ago, the MWM  registered as a political party with Pakistan's Election Commission, and has now decided to contest elections. Party officials have vowed to field candidates for 100 parliamentary seats (60 of them in the national assembly), mostly representing Shia-majority areas in Punjab and in Pakistan's other three provinces. However, owing to a variety of factors-such as the lack of electoral success of Pakistani religious parties, and the MWM's dearth of political resources-the party's big-picture prospects appear dim.

The takeaway? Pakistan's sectarian violence is unlikely to delay this year's election. And, owing to the strong likelihood of a PPP or PML-N victory on May 11, the votes cast by those in the crosshairs of that violence will fail to delay the inevitable-the arrival in power of another fragile coalition unable or unwilling to protect them.

Michael Kugelman is the senior program associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He can be reached at michael.kugelman@wilsoncenter.org or on Twitter @michaelkugelman

There is talk of civil war in the mountains of Khost, the fields of the Helmand River Valley, and on the streets of Kabul. With 2014 looming, Afghans, journalists, diplomats, and military officers alike are wondering what the future holds for this troubled country straddling the Hindu Kush.

Will there be civil war or not? In a recent report I co-authored with Scott Bates for the Center for National Policy, we pointed to civil war and the related problem of security force fragmentation as two of the biggest risks Afghanistan faces. Dexter Filkins penned a persuasive essay in the New Yorker full of vivid details about the factional and ethnic rivalries within the Afghan National Army (ANA) and among its glut of militias. One of his interview subjects memorably remarked:

This country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government. Mir Alam will take Kunduz. Atta will take Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum will take Sheberghan. The Karzais will take Kandahar. The Haqqanis will take Paktika. If these things don't happen, you can burn my bones when I die.

Another journalist, Robert Dreyfuss, insists that such dire predictions are foolhardy. Citing Afghanistan's former Ambassador to France and Canada, Omar Samad, he argues that Afghans will look into the abyss, lean back, and compromise.

However, people on both sides of this debate are missing the forest for the trees. This misperception begins with our collective failure to take Afghanistan's history seriously.

We often act and talk as if Afghan history began on 9/11, but our reaction to al Qaeda's attacks was an intervention in a long-standing and still-unresolved civil war.

It began over thirty years ago, when the Khalq faction of the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the regime of President Mohammad Daud Khan in 1978 and instituted a series of far-reaching radical reforms that sparked rebellion across the country. Against their better judgment, the Soviets occupied the country in support of their beleaguered communist allies, inflaming conflict, which saw seven main mujahideen parties supported by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and a host of Arab volunteers pitted against the Soviets and the PDPA, who were also divided into two factions.

The mujahideen parties fought each other almost as much as the infidels. The "national" character of these parties was always a screen for a myriad of local conflicts over water, land, tribe, sect, ethnicity, prestige and power. 

The Afghan civil war can be divided into different phases. The first was the nascent period of unorganized rebellion that followed the overthrow of Daud Khan. The second phase witnessed the gradual organization of the rebels into the Peshawar Seven and the introduction of Soviet troops. These troops withdrew in 1989 and the mujahideen parties turned on each other along with various quasi-government militias, marking the third phase. The regime of President Najibullah held onto pockets of the country and Kabul. Then the Afghan security forces buckled as Soviet largess vanished into history. Kabul fell in 1992 and the mujahideen continued to fight each other for supremacy, beginning the fourth phase.  The Afghans looked into the abyss and jumped straight in.

The fifth phase saw the Taliban - a movement led by mujahideen veterans - storm through the south, take Kabul, and come to a stalemate with the Northern Alliance, a coalition dominated by members of Jamiat-i-Islami. The sixth phase began with Western intervention and the toppling of the Taliban regime in Kabul in response to 9/11. And the current phase has witnessed a return to rebellion, with the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami, and Jalaluddin Haqqani's network battling the American-supported regime. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency has reprised its role in the Soviet-Afghan War, now sponsoring and directing rebellion against an American-led coalition.

The leaders of the current rebel movements are rooted in the Peshawar Seven. Taliban leader Mullah Omar fought the Soviets in the south as a part of Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islami. Gulbuddin, an old rival of Ahmad Shah Massoud, has been causing trouble ever since he took to throwing acid at the faces of unveiled women and brawling with rival student activists at the University of Kabul in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His Hizb-i-Islami fought Jamiat-i-Islami and others for control of Kabul in the early 1990s. Haqqani cut his teeth fighting Daud Khan in the 1970s and as a mujahideen commander under Mohammad Yunus Khalis in the 1980s.

And we see the same cast of characters elsewhere. The same mujahideen and government officials who were fighting for God and/or country, selling narcotics, and committing atrocities since the 1970s are some of our closest friends and allies in the war's current phase.

There are differences in scale between these phases in terms of ferocity of combat and destruction, flows of internally displaced persons and refugees, as well as the numbers of casualties. Estimates of casualty and, to a lesser extent, refugee figures in the last thirty years of war vary widely.

In 1978, an estimated 40,000 Afghans were killed, followed by 80,000 in 1979. By 1987, less than a decade after the Soviets entered the conflict directly between 1 and 1.5 million Afghans had been killed in the war. This represents about 9% of the entire Afghan population, which is higher proportionally than the deaths suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II. Losses were more than twice as high among refugees, who were often more vulnerable to attack, disease, infection, and starvation than those who remained in their villages. By the Soviet withdrawal, there were 6.2 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan.

During the 1990s, estimates of civilians killed range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands as the mujahideen fought over territory. Much of Kabul was reduced to rubble as various mujahideen commanders fought from neighborhood to neighborhood.

In 2001, different tallies claim somewhere between several thousand and 20,000 Afghans were killed as a result of the American-led intervention. Casualties dipped between 2002 and 2005. Since 2006, over 12,000 Afghan civilians have been killed due to the war. Most of these have been killed by the insurgency. These figures were increasing over the last few years, but have dropped in 2012. Regardless, they still pale in comparison to the 80s and likely the early and mid-1990s as well. More than 5.7 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since 2002, but 2.5 million Afghan refugees remain, mostly in neighboring countries.

But war is not only a balance sheet of death and destruction. It is a political activity in which force is assessed to be an appropriate means by which to pursue political interests.

The underlying political disagreements, factional rivalries, toxic personalities, and Pakistani interventions and proxies that have been driving war in Afghanistan remain unresolved. The modern bureaucratic system that Western technocrats have willed into existence has not sufficiently vested Afghans in non-violent politics. Afghanistan is already divided into fiefdoms. An ocean of money and the American-led occupation force are all that holds them all together. Both will soon get much smaller.

So the question of whether or not Afghanistan will devolve into civil war after 2014 is the wrong one. The civil war will, of course, only continue. The question is, what will the next phase look like and how can we shape it for the better?

The greatest risk and most likely outcome is the fragmentation of the Afghan National Security Forces. The biggest danger is posed by the divisions within the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Afghan Local Police (ALP) destabilizing the larger security force institutions. Most of the personnel in both of these forces are deployed in or near their home districts.

And like politics, all civil war is local.

The Nahr-e-Saraj police force in Helmand, for example, is divided between competing narcotics thugs, former Hizb-i-Islami fighters, former communists, and their children all of whom share a history of rivalry, murder, war, and hatred that have barely been contained over the last several years.  Different ALP militias in Central Helmand also hail from different factions. Once their special operations mentors withdraw, they may begin to clash with each other, the ANP, and the ANA.

As long as the United States and its allies stay abreast of these factional politics, they can mitigate -- but not avoid -- this fragmentation through proactive in-country diplomacy, firm mentoring, and appropriate mechanisms for the distribution of funding and supplies. ALP militias must be integrated into the Afghan National Police now rather than later. As the ALP force currently stands, it poses an unacceptable risk to the long-term integrity of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

The trouble is, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has not been systemically mapping these factional conflicts down to the local level and incorporating this information into their planning. ISAF, the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, and the US Embassy in Kabul should create a large and mobile cell of officers, diplomats, aid officials, analysts. This cell would be tasked with traveling around Afghanistan and achieving a granular understanding of the local conflicts that are driving the war and threaten to tear the ANSF and the country apart.

What will the next phase of civil war hold? How many will die? Despite the thousands dead over the last decade, the current phase pales in comparison to the 80s and early 90s. Afghans may come to remember the last ten years as the orange slice in the middle of the soccer match. Some in Washington and London have vested hope in negotiations, but there is little evidence for optimism on that front.

Afghanistan is no longer a counterinsurgency problem. Most foreign troops will be heading for the exits over the next two years. Only by taking its politics and history seriously down to the local level will we be able to help ensure sufficient stability as the International Security Assistance Force itself becomes history.

Ryan Evans is a Research Fellow at the Center for National Policy.

Ibn-e-Insha, the 20^th century Pakistani poet wrote, "Iss shehar main ji ko lagana kiya?/Weshi ko sakoon se kiya matlab?" ("Why commit yourself to this city?/What interest do tyrants have with peace?") Although I was living in Karachi some 30 years after his burial there, both of these rhetorical questions stayed with me practically every moment of my time spent in the city. Last month I returned from Karachi, where I spent the summer researching the demographics behind the urban violence that has wracked Karachi for years, but picked up again in earnest.

It is only quite recently that Karachi has come under serious discussion at the international level, yet the factors driving violence and killings in the city this year have been present for at least the past 25 years, and their roots go back even further. And still, there has not been any notable progress in creating a lasting response. The police remain weak, the local and national governments still periodically raise the prospect of "bringing in the army," and leaders of political parties sit comfortably while an ever-increasing number of their minions meet brutal ends.

And while there is much that ails Pakistan besides Karachi, what happens in the city is in part a microcosm of what is tormenting the country as a whole: feeble security, over-population, poor public transportation and housing, weak law and order, abuse of public services by the wealthy and powerful, illegal land-grabbing and squatter settlements, pollution so pervasive that it contaminates food and water for all, ethnic divisions, sectarian divisions, meager education; in short, institutional inadequacies on a grand scale.

Yet institutional "failure," is in some ways a hyperbolic assessment. After all, this is also a city that has provided space for the smallest, and largest, businesses to prosper; a city that grants unrivalled port access to everyone from fishermen to NATO ships; a city that is home to prolific writers, poets, humorists, agriculturalists, entrepreneurs, divine restaurants, a growing, yet hugely talented, blogosphere, and a history that witnessed Alexander the Great, Mohammad Bin Qasim (the Umayyad General who set his sights on the revered Silk Road trade route), and Sir Charles Napier (a British General who conquered the province of Sindh) uncontrollably drawn to the City of Lights. And it is in this paradoxical, puzzling, and ambivalent sense that one must strive to understand Karachi, and beyond it Pakistan, or resign oneself to understanding neither.

***

Despite Pakistan's heterogeneity, one aspect of the country that demonstrates some homogeneity is the universal nature of the "clan-based" system of allegiance that is ingrained in most Pakistanis. This system has been recognized for some time, and was articulated recently, and most clearly, by the scholar Anatol Lieven in his book, Pakistan: A Hard Country. Beyond the traditional clan culture based on local identity that pervades Pakistan's villages and tribes, one can also view the army as a clan, nationalist groups as clans, political parties as clans, sects as clans, among countless others. All promote self-interest and root faith in their clan above other, ostensibly higher, metaphysical pursuits. The vast number of "clans" results in a vast number of different perspectives and perceptions of governance and how the country is -- and should be -- run. There exists no widely accepted social contract, for instance, between the central (or provincial, for that matter) authority and its people. As such, one's allegiance -- political, ethnic, sectarian, socio-economic, linguistic, or other -- will determine one's value system, which will in turn dictate where one sees the greatest problems crippling the country. And it is this variation that makes the response to debilitating political violence that we witness in Karachi difficult to measure. Many agree that it is ruining the political and social fabric of Karachi, and to a large extent, Pakistan, but consensus solutions remain elusive.

Moreover, these conflicts between "clans" take place in an environment where space is increasingly at a premium. The fight for space, a basic human need, in Karachi gives rise to the most vicious kind of violence. Violence is chosen from a set of strategies available to political actors to assert sovereignty when the threat to their survival is strongest. There are many indicators to suggest that space in Karachi can no longer spread out, only up; six-story buildings populate areas reserved for 2-story homes. Earlier this summer such a building collapsed, leading to several deaths. Ultimately, people have no choice but to stay where they are, quite literally, and endure the violence as best as they can.

Other reasons pepper the growing fight for space. During the course of my research, I spoke about the violence in Karachi with a politically active office clerk who has commuted from the Orangi Town slum (one of the largest in South Asia) to the upscale Clifton area for over a decade. His perspective was of interest to me, as he traveled daily from a home situated in one of the bloodiest parts of the city to one of its safer spaces. Having seen his cousin killed before his own eyes, and he himself having recovered from two bullet wounds, why had he not shipped off, and out, of Orangi Town? He told me about his resolve not to leave an area where he had grown up and where his family, friends and local political leaders resided. In turn, he asked: "And anyway, where would I go? This place is exploding at the seams."

Despite such static claims, not all is laborious or obligatory in Karachi. People stay in this burgeoning city because it provides an opportunity to earn incomes unequaled in the rest of Pakistan. The population of the city increased 176 percent between 1941-1951 (due mostly to partition), and then by 217 percent between 1951-1972. Such increases have fueled over-population, but they also demonstrate the opportunity Pakistanis, and others, see in the city. People continue to arrive from around the country to settle in Karachi, a city that boasts the famous saying, "the streets are littered with gold; all you have to do is pick it up." Therefore, a thread begins to emerge here, weaving together tensions over space, clan, and party for reasons historically rooted in economic opportunity. This, of course, lends itself to the idea that solutions to some of the city's problems may lay in expanding industry, and improving urban environments, in other parts of the country. However, it appears that this will only place a plaster, albeit an attractive one, over a hemorrhage.

My interviews with Karachiites also suggest that fewer people are now beginning to migrate for conventional economic opportunity in comparison with past years, as competition for business, jobs, and trade today is immense, and high operating costs have crowded out small businesses. One consequence of this shift has been the expansion of the black market economies, and more illicit activity including bribes, kidnapping, and looting to satiate the economic need that drives thousands of people to arrive in Karachi. As such, as more people arrive in the city and are subsumed by existing political groups as workers or mureeds (followers), the above-mentioned clan structures begin to consolidate, resembling a state within a state. These clans tend to be hyper-politicized, a dynamic that often leads down a dangerous path. Here, violent methods used by politicized factions, including parties themselves, become institutionalized in the absence of a civil society that is in its nascent stages, and where state institutions remain volatile. And there is little evidence to suggest that such methods would dissipate if space in Karachi were to be expanded out (as is mooted in many circles in the city) or if industry were to be built in other parts of the country to create jobs. These ills would migrate wherever clans went.

Indeed, some contend that Karachi's woes continue to arrive from the outside, be it international capital and the process of globalization, or migrants coming in from other parts of the country or region. This, of course, is untrue. Living as part of the elite slice of Karachi's society, many of the city's educated and wealthy inhabitants recall the Karachi of the pre-Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq era, where they would explore their youth in the city's discotheques and clubs, and never have to worry about guns firing at night. Theirs was a Karachi of peace and prosperity. Today as then, they have the luxury of living in plush homes guarded by private security guards and surrounded by amenities that any inhabitant of Georgetown or Kensington would blush to look at. Indeed, theirs is also a clan that does not, and for security concerns cannot, busy itself with what happens in Qasba Colony or Banaras Chowk. A blasé outlook, one might suggest, but one that affords this community the ability to look away, albeit, at times, uncomfortably. Still, in looking away, they help abet the turmoil, as it is from within their clan structures that politicos and politicized industrialists are born who in turn send out men with guns to wreak havoc in the streets and settle political scores.

What options does this leave not for the incoming migrant or elite businessman, but for the average person in Karachi? Why is it that they, who cannot hide behind the umbrella of ideology or wealth, remain resilient? Indeed, it is because of them that Karachi is populated with a silent, but growing middle-class -- an entire generation that has lived with this violence. Their resilience comes from a sense of not knowing anything different. "This will all boil over, the politicians will compromise, and things will return to normal," are things I heard regularly in my time among them in the city. Policymakers in Pakistan talk about "cleanup operations" to rid the city of "miscreants" and gangsters -- but did such operations work the last time they were tried, in the 1990s, when the government made the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and their Muhajir following their target? Or, did it work in the 1980s, when Sohrab Ghot and its surrounding areas were bulldozed to clean up the drug mafias and the largely Pashtun slums? The people of Karachi have been enduring and accepting witnesses to each of these "operations." The short memories of some may help perpetuate the city's problems, but it also affords many others a strange immunity, allowing them to live and work, day-by-day.

Insha continued in the aforementioned poem, "jis jholi main saw chayd hoay, uss jholi ka phaylana kiya?" (Metaphorically translated, "the hands you spread for blessings are so battered: what is the point now in raising them?"). The reality of Karachi remains grounded in the collective will of its inhabitants to persevere through the city's mess, rooted in their countless distinct experiences, aggregating to infuse the city with some semblance of order. Their immunity, though, also breeds resignation to any meaningful change. Though one cannot term it disinterest, a certain sense of despondency pervades the city. Most people living in Karachi want an end to the violence; history and context compel them to believe it won't end. And who can blame them? They are ruled by tyrants who have no interest in peace.

Bilal Baloch is a graduate sudent at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he concentrates on comparative politics and South Asia.

The residents of Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, are no strangers to death and destruction. One of its most popular bazaars was bombed in the 1980s.  Its parks have been strewn with human flesh. Its roads have been full of men shooting blindly at anyone and everyone. Its alleyways have been home to bodies in gunny bags.

Over the past few decades, Karachi's battle-weary citizens have grown familiar to the depressing series of headlines, and now, to "targeted killings." Over 1,000 people were killed in the first ten months of 2010, a 15-year high, and 43 people have been killed since March 18.

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The headlines coming out of Karachi recently look like those I saw when I lived there in the early 1990s, underscoring dozens of people killed in city violence daily. But there is a complicating factor today that propels these headlines into the global spotlight: "Talibanization."

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