Earlier this summer, a force of approximately ten militants attacked Pakistan’s Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan. The death toll from the attack, including the ten attackers, was approximately 38. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, stating it was a response to the death of one of their leaders during an American drone strike last year. While the attack did not succeed in hijacking a civilian airliner, it highlights an ominous drift for Pakistan and for the world more generally. For Pakistan, it marked a renewed belligerence by the Pakistani Taliban, also known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, which has been met by the government by a major offensive in the Northwestern tribal areas. For the world, it demonstrates a disturbing trend: the shift of extremist violence from tribal villages and regions to the megacities of the developing world. Coupled with the governance problems that already exist in major cities, this trend could create significant problems for nations facing major urbanization in coming years.
The Eternal City
Urban centers have a long role in the history of war, including insurgencies and low intensity conflicts. During insurgencies of the 20th century, urban violence and terrorism in places like Algeria, Malaysia, South Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and Afghanistan was a key feature of conflicts.
In these earlier insurgency and low intensity struggles, the militarily more advanced and better-equipped forces of modernized countries like the United States, France, United Kingdom, or Soviet Union were able to maintain significant control over the urban centers of a country. In the case of South Vietnam, the United States was able to easily hold major cities like Saigon and Da Nang against insurgent attacks, even during major assaults such as the Tet Offensive. The strength of the guerillas, in Vietnam and numerous other low intensity conflicts, was in the countryside.
Dr. David Kilcullen, a retired officer in the Australian Armed Forces and an expert on counterinsurgency, explained this trend in an interview with the HPR, saying “for most of history, cities were much more legible than the countryside, in the sense that the government could understand what was going on. If you go up into the mountains and into the jungle, it’s harder to find you. The cover is in the countryside, and so insurgents go there.” This was certainly true in South Vietnam, where American forces were unable to pacify the rural areas of the country. The Vietnamese communist insurgents recruited additional cadres and smuggled supplies through the more porous rural areas for attacks against concentrations of foreign troops in the cities.
This pattern, of counterinsurgent control over cities, and insurgent domination in the countryside, emerged in insurgency conflicts in places like Algeria and Afghanistan as well. Violence and fighting still reached urban areas under counterinsurgent control. However, these incidents were generally smaller-scale terrorist attacks, not larger hybrid or near-conventional fights between security forces and large groups of insurgents.
The Rise of the Megacity
The past several decades have marked a significant change in the old paradigm of violent insurgencies. Steadily, urbanization has concentrated more and more people in massive global cities, often in the developing world. Pakistan, for example, is currently experiencing an urbanization rate of 3 percent. While a third of Pakistani citizens live in massive cities like Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad today, that number will reach approximately 50 percent of the entire Pakistani population by 2025. “There are major demographic changes that are pushing a lot of populations into urban spaces, underway in Latin American and Africa and happening in Asia. Part of this is simply the result of demographic changes, and part of the focus is due to the ineptitude of governments in handling the influx of people. This is especially true in multi-million resident cities,” Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution explained to the HPR.
The majority of the largest cities in the next ten years are projected to be in developing nations. Many of these developing cities, such Lagos, Cairo, and Karachi are growing in nations that are also undergoing significant insurgencies or civil unrest, with the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, the ongoing instability and struggle with Islamists in Egypt, and the conflict with the TTP in Pakistan.
Urban areas pose many significant problems for governments to contend with. As more individuals move to cities, many are only able to find housing in slum conditions on the outskirts of the city, often with substandard sewer and water treatment systems. The concentration of people without sufficient sanitation generally also leads to increased water and air pollution, which further degrades the health of inhabitants in major cities. The significant lack of economic opportunity also generates increased crime and corruption, which further hampers government efforts to alleviate the conditions in megacities.
The primary challenge for governments of megacities is a lack of sufficient means to deal with the major challenges of urbanization. “In the developing world, where urbanization is particularly pronounced, governments often lack the resources—financial, technical, and vocational—to deliver food, water, energy, housing, education, and healthcare to so many people,” Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson Center, wrote in an email to the HPR. “Another basic service that municipal governments in growing cities often struggle to provide is security. Finally, employment is another huge challenge for urbanizing cities.” Governments that are able to meet only one aspect of these needs, such as providing security, still face a restive population that desires the other basic services such as health, water, and energy. The combination of a lack of basic services, employment, and security control in urban centers serves as a dangerous, lawless concentration of individuals that criminals, terrorists, and insurgents can take advantage of.
The Militant Metropolis
The major urbanization underway globally, with the incumbent challenges it brings, has been a significant contributor to growing conflicts in cities. Kilcullen, who also recently authored Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla highlighted Pakistan, India, Nigeria, and Brazil as nations at a high risk of urban conflict in the near future. Regarding Pakistan, Kilcullen emphasized the movement of fighting and of the Pakistani Taliban into major cities such as Karachi and Quetta. In the case of India, he pointed to the threat of the Maoist Naxalite insurgency, which has started to gain supporters in urban megacities like Mumbai, and highlighted growing urban conflicts in slums in Nigeria and the exacerbation of long standing urban difficulties in Brazil.
In rapidly growing cities, large numbers of people living in slums become populations that turn more easily turn towards violence. “Many people join militant outfits for micro reasons that have little to do with the large macro-justification and causes of the militancy. These micro-reasons might include personal grievances or network connections. Some of the reasons might be making money. For the poor who have no jobs and no educational or social opportunities, the militancy might be a way to do something; they might as well fight,” Felbab-Brown explained. With the concentration of people in cities, without significant social mobility or basic government services, armed groups have a large recruiting pool to draw from, resulting in violence spreading from the countryside more directly into urban areas.
Crime and lawlessness is another major aspect that gives rise to armed groups. In places where governments have a difficult time providing security, residents may turn to their own armed groups for defense. “There aren’t a lot of Sunday school choirs running slums in the third world, so almost certainly if you’re going to survive for any length of time in control of an area like a slum, you probably are an armed group,” Kilcullen explained.
It is also very easy for criminal networks and insurgencies to blend together in their tactics and actions. “Criminal activities can have some of the same adverse effects on security [as insurgencies],” Dr. Felbab-Brown noted. “While drug smugglers in Mexico do not necessarily amount to a criminal insurgency, they have very significant influence and control of the state functions in their areas.” Insurgent groups also sustain themselves of off criminality, as evidenced by the FARC in Columbia. According to Kilcullen, “All insurgencies carry out illicit acts, like bank robberies or kidnappings, to sustain themselves, but really until the end of the Cold War, a lot of developing world insurgencies were sponsored by the Soviet Union or China. Once the Soviet Union fell in 1991, that source of foreign assistance dried up for a lot of these groups, so they had to look for other sources of funding. And in some cases, that was crime.”
The Pakistani Problem
While many nations are facing the specter of significant urban violence, Pakistan, with its unstable government, nuclear arsenal, extremist insurgency, and interests in regional terrorist activity, is an epicenter of urban conflict. Urbanization in Pakistan is driven by many of the same factors as in other nations, with the added impact of localized conflicts.
“Conflict is also a huge driver of urbanization in Pakistan. Ever since it’s founding, war and conflict have helped fuel the growth of Pakistan’s cities. This is because when there have been wars in rural areas of Pakistan, and in the broader region, people have been displaced and ended up in cities… What’s particularly troubling is that in recent years, militants have mixed in with these civilian refugee migrations into cities—and this is why the number of Pakistani Taliban fighters in Karachi has grown so much in recent years.” Kugelman described. The movement of Pakistani Taliban into major cities, such as Karachi, where they effectively control multiple neighborhoods, is key in allowing the terrorist group to carry out major attacks in urban areas, such as the Karachi Airport raid.
In Pakistan’s case, ideology, along with inequality, has become a major driver of radicalism and terrorist recruitment. Kugelman emphasized that ideology in Pakistan is very significant in increasing the ranks of extremists. “This ideological environment in Pakistani cities may help explain why it’s not just the urban poor that are targeted for recruitment to radical causes. Essentially, anyone who succumbs to hardline ideologies is a logical candidate for recruitment.”
In Pakistan, local media, which often carries a harsh anti-Western line, is very influential, helping driving radicalization. Private TV channels are especially popular in cities, and often promote hard line ideologies. “Influential urbanites-from religious leaders to hardline politicians-are happy to propagate such messages even further,” Kugelman added. The combination of growing middle class radicalism, urban poverty, and sensationalist and ideologically polarize media, has made Pakistan’s cities an unstable cauldron, which threatens to produce more violence.
The Right Answer
The trends of urbanization are not showing any signs of slowing down. However, there are potential remedies that governments are already considering to alleviate these problematic conditions, and gain a greater control over their urban areas. Many times, these policies need to bring some form of government presence to the lives of citizens who may have never had a governmental presence in their communities. In the words of Felbab-Brown, “In large parts of cities like Karachi or Lagos, there was never really any official state governance or presence to begin with. If only the new project for the state were regaining control and regaining footing, it would be less of a challenge. Instead, the state needs to establish itself in communities and areas that have never had state governance, or have only experienced it in a negative way.”
Kilcullen described a process he and his colleagues use to provide solutions to distressed urban communities, which involves close collaboration between local community leaders and outside policy and development experts. “What you are looking for from the local community is leadership, and ownership, and local knowledge, and what you bring from the outside is the technical, functional knowledge, but it has to happen in a safe environment so that people feel confident to put the weapon down and engage in a constructive discussion,” he said.
An example of this process, carried out by Kilcullen and his team, involved community safety in Benin City, Nigeria. In working with both national police and local leaders, they identified several modifications to the city, such as wider streets and better lighting, as well as clearly defining which parts of the community the police would cover, and which the community would police itself. Through this process, the community hoped to cut down its crime rates, and promote greater stability. Measures such as these, upgrades to the urban infrastructure, with discussions between government and community representatives, offers a path for stressed administrations to build trust with citizens and increase the governance of an urban community.
As for Pakistan, the government may be beginning to take measures to provide security in the cities. In early August, Pakistani authorities deployed additional paramilitary Rangers to cities to heighten security, and also banned large-scale gatherings in Islamabad. However, these measures remain incomplete, and it is unclear whether they will really increase security in Pakistani cities or will instead further alienate residents. What Pakistan really needs, according to Felbab-Brown, is to prioritize. “They have limited resources and an extraordinary amount of space and population that does not live under the government control. They need to break the linkages between organized crime and political parties. The state needs to be willing to dispense with their use of criminal actors, then they need to launch a more robust police action which includes permanent police presence throughout and cleaning up the police of corruption, as well as socio-economic programs to create bonds between the state and the residents. And all of this requires difficult prioritization on specific areas,” she concluded. In recent months, Pakistan has made strides to improve its law enforcement and security capacities in cities, a program which the United States has provided expert advisers and capacity builders to support. However, as the recent fighting in North Waziristan shows, the government still is highly focused on pushing insurgents out of the tribal belt areas, rather than the cities, and still is unable to provide the prerequisite security for urban residents.
Fortunately for governments facing these challenges, there are a myriad of ideas on addressing the issues of mass urbanization. Unfortunately, the ability to enact these ideas remains to be mired in bureaucracy, weak state power, and corruption, even as the inexorable tide of the urbanizing world continues. Without significant changes soon, nations that have devoted the past decade to “The War on Terror,” especially the United States, may soon find their enemy is no longer in the Pakistani tribal belt, or the West African Sahel. The next challenge to global security lies, rather, in the heart of the world’s biggest cities.
Image credit: Flickr / Guilhem Vellut