The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

carried out gun attacks on police officers, journalists and members of rival political parties, mostly ethnic Pashtuns who were themselves armed. In 2009, American diplomats estimated the MQM had 10,000 men under arms, with another 25,000 in reserve. ‘A frightening military organization cohabiting within a political party,’ judged the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. But Hussain, oddly unbothered by the British authorities, seemed untouchable. Nine Zero, which was located inside a maze of streets patrolled by armed gunmen, had the air of a neighbourhood militia base. At a nearby traffic junction, a monument depicted a giant fist smashing through a granite plinth. DISTANCE DOES NOT MATTER, read the inscription. Karachi’s volatile politics contributed to its unenviable international reputation. The American journalist Daniel Pearl died here in 2002, executed in a garden shed by the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad; in the years that followed, the fugitive leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Omar, was often reported (probably erroneously) to be hiding in its slums. India’s most notorious gangster, Dawood Ibrahim, lived quietly under ISI protection in a mansion behind the popular Abdullah Shah Ghazi Sufi shrine. Western diplomats travelled in bulletproof jeeps, as they would in Kabul or Baghdad.