According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, over 1,400 people were killed in the city in violent incidents in the first eight months of 2011. At its peak in the month of July alone there were 358 killings.

And the violence is affecting businesses especially hard.

“They came with gunmen,” said Parveen Rehman, who heads a social development nongovernmental organization in Karachi. “Five or six went into the courtyard and they said that ‘today we will occupy this place no matter what.’”

Rehman said the armed thugs wanted to take over the group’s compound. Luckily, she said, a person in her organization knew someone more powerful. So they turned to him for help.

“He came and he said if you fire then we’ll fire many more rounds,” Rehman said. “So imagine, to save ourselves, we went to a bigger thug.”

This is by no means an isolated incident. Many organizations and businesses face similar problems. And it’s especially hard to fix because the violence goes right to the top, to city officials and political parties.

Karachi houses almost every different ethnic and political group in the country: Muhajirs, Pashtuns, Baloch, Sindhis… not to mention a range of Islamist groupings.

All of the different groups have political organizations that claim to represent them. And most of those groups have their own militias. Parveen Rehman said that grabbing land brings lots of power.

“There is continuous battle over various segments of land in Karachi between various groups of people who I would not say are given sanction by any one political party; but who as a strategy align themselves with political parties,” Rehman explained. “And police and of course all the government departments and the elected members are all partners in this. Because the money involved is so much, that overnight you can earn so much more.”

It’s a strategic mix of politics, crime and business. Once a political party’s thugs steal land, it’s divided and illegally sold to others. And that creates an instant – beholden – constituency.

This phenomenon of “land-grabbing” exploits the weakness of state institutions, as well as the ever-increasing demand for housing not met by the government. About half of Karachi’s estimated 17 million people live this way, dependent on one private group or another.

“It could be housing, transport, drinking water, even electricity,” said Haris Gazdar, a political economist at the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi. “Most of all, all of these activities are underpinned by informal systems of contract enforcement. So contracts were then enforced by private people, sometimes in collusion with government officials who had all kinds of side deals with them. So you had a situation where the private use of violence was legitimate.”

Add to the mix a massive influx of arms to Karachi during the Soviet War in neighboring Afghanistan during the 1980’s, creating what is referred to locally as the “Kalashnikov culture.”

And today, everyone in the city seems to be armed. There are twice as many private security guards in the city as police officers, not to mention tens of thousands of private weapons.

Faisal Subzwari is a government minister from the MQM, a party that represents the Muhajir community and which is often accused of using strong arm tactics. Subzwari denied that his party has its own militia, but he admitted to carrying a weapon. He called it only normal to be armed.

“It’s my lawful right to have licensed armed weapons and people must have them. Why? I am quoting you specific examples of inaction from the police’s part, politically motivated targeted killings, and politically motivated ethnic cleansing. If the government isn’t doing anything, rather helping out criminals and gangsters then in order to save my skin at least I would acquire a licensed weapon which is not a crime in Pakistan today,” Subzwari said.

So everyone is armed because everyone else in the city is armed. As political economist Haris Gazdar explains, trying to change this “arms race” will be extremely difficult.

“The major kind of gaps in urban planning and political management, and the existence of military governments over long periods of time have led us there,” Gazdar said. “And realistically we shouldn’t expect any political party to give up on this model on its own.”

And until that happens, expect the seemingly unchecked violence in Karachi to continue.

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KATY CLARK: Asma Jahanjir is head of the Independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. And like all Pakistanis Jahanjir is deeply concerned by the current violence in her country. She’s visiting Washington at the moment. And Asma Jahanjir the situation in Pakistan is pretty difficult right now. Can you give us a sense of the mood in Pakistan cities with all of these terror attacks? How is it affecting life for the average Pakistani right now?

ASMA JAHANJIR: Life is very tough. It’s very difficult. When I left Pakistan there had been three suicide attacks in the whole. And that day I myself was absolutely amazed that despite everything, despite the sorrow, despite how people were devastated, people were going about their own work. But there is a bit of depression. People are not going out for shopping. As you know we’re having slow economic turndown. For example, we don’t have electricity half the day. There’s a shortage of gas supply. There’s a shortage of water. All this plus the fact that openly the Interior Ministry is saying we cannot protect you, please protect yourself. This is very demanding on people. And yet the resilience of the Pakistanis is something that nobody talks about. It is amazing. They are so patient with what has happened.

CLARK: Patient to the point where do you think that they’re willing to stick it out? And is the government and the military willing to stick it out for as long as it takes to defeat the Taliban and other extremists fighting in Pakistan? I mean things are likely to only get worse before they get better.

JAHANJIR: I believe that the people of Pakistan have stuck so far. It’s very, very nasty there. And I believe that in any other place you would have seen numbers of people getting up and leaving the country which has not happened in Pakistan. As far as the political parties are concerned, I think that they are taking great risks to their lives both at a personal level and at a collective level. They are saying very openly that they are going to now fight militants. They are going to fight terrorism. It is in our interest to do it. But as far as the military is concerned whether they’re fighting when they have to or whether they have changed their way of thinking is still mood question and politicians are afraid that unless pressure is not kept on them the idea will be of dispersing militants rather than dismantling militants infrastructure in Pakistan.

CLARK: Well given all of the suffering, all of the violence, that Pakistan is experiencing right now, would you say Pakistan is in a state of civil war or on the brink of civil war?

JAHANJIR: Well I’d hate to use that word because I come from there; I live there. I would like to think that we are not in a state of civil war. But the fact remains that there are fissures that you can see even between and inside the security forces. You can see that there is resistance. We had one of the chief ministers of a province saying very openly on television that all those people in government services who are siding with the Taliban, supporting them, protecting them, are giving them protection and safe passage have to be turned in and people must come and tell us who and identify who these people are. Similarly there have been certain attacks where it is apparent that people from inside those institutions have had some kind of collaboration with the perpetrators. So we think that there is certainly cracks within the military and the establishment and particularly intelligence agencies themselves.

CLARK: On a personal level I wanted to ask about your life and your work right now. I mean for years you have been fighting against all sorts of human rights abuses in Pakistan. Well and I should say too that the government hasn’t always been happy with what you’ve been doing and what you’ve been saying. Has life gotten any harder or any easier for you say in this past year even?

JAHANJIR: Let me put it this way, that life is harder for all of us because there is just so much pressure, so much violence. You know you get so confused. It’s psychologically very disabling. And you don’t know who’s doing what. I mean when I was traveling Balutschistan for a week I was told to change my hotel everyday because if the intelligence agencies wanted to kill me and put it on the nationalists it would help them and if the nationalists wanted to kill me and put it on the intelligence agency it would help them. So we are going through that kind of an insecure period. But we still continue to work and must work.

CLARK: Asma Jahanjir is chair woman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan based in Lahore. Thank you so much.

JAHANJIR: Thank you.

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