THERE is no overbearing judge. There is no buccaneering general. There is no fifth columnist, no obstreperous bureaucrat, no militant with suicide jacket on, no rogue intelligence operators, no foreign hand.

There aren't any international terrorists bankrolling opposition moves as there is virtually no opposition.

In other words, there aren't any of the usual bugaboos President Asif Ali Zardari is so fond of blaming for hatching conspiracies against the PPP-led government. Politically, Sindh is completely clear of these 'political actors'. And yet Karachi, the provincial capital, has slipped into hellish violence, its peace buried under the ever-increasing piles of dead bodies.

No city in the world, not even Kabul or Baghdad, two war-stricken countries' capitals, has seen the kind of brutality that Karachi citizens witnessed last week. Even in Kurram Agency, where a full-fledged military operation is under way against militants, the death toll remained far less than the sad scorecard from Pakistan's financial nerve centre displayed during the days when murder peaked.

What explains Karachi's game of death is primarily incompetence and incapability — a lethal combination when mixed with corruption and mismanagement. For years, the Sindh government, like the one at the centre, has been hiding behind the standard argument that reconciliation is the best way forward in straightening administrative tangles. In the name of having the mandate to rule — which no one should contest — it has been playing to political galleries of a vast variety, postponing basic reforms for maintaining law and order.

The aging Qaim Ali Shah has been a useless chief minister who, like Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, has confined himself to enjoying the perks of his high office. Like Mr Gilani, Mr Shah has been expending his limited energies on delivering banal lectures on democracy or on recalling the party's sacrifices, completely removing himself from the fundamental duty of protecting the lives of citizens who are unfortunate enough to be entrusted to his care.

As a result, when Karachi fell to the dogs of gang war, there was no strategy in place. No administrative plan was ready to be put in the field to curb and catch the killers. The provincial cabinet was non-existent. Party leaders, who can't be suppressed in talks shows and public rallies, were not heard of for days. President Zardari, who only weeks ago was offering his political opponents coaching lessons in basic politics, was lackadaisical as ever, holding a leisurely meeting after three days of violence and recommending pro forma measures.

It is important to recount all of this to contextualise the endemic problem of violence in Karachi. These incidents do not happen without warning. There is a well-established pattern followed by any serious law and order breakdown. It is for the government to closely monitor this pattern and position resources and strategies to ensure that the slide down the path of chaos is halted. It is also for the government to engineer long-term and effective administrative solutions to address chronic sources of violence.

In the case of Karachi, this means taking on gangs that have virtually overthrown the writ of the state from vast swathes of the city and run these areas like their fiefdoms. The attempt to disinfect the city of these gangs through 'reconciliation' was bound to fail since most of these gangs are politically aligned, with their roots embedded in the provincial body politic. You might set a thief to catch a thief, but that is hardly the way to deal with killers.

The PPP government and all of the party leadership should know this. After all, they have been the biggest proponents of strong-arm action against extremists in Fata and elsewhere, saying that this is the only way to deal with, in American idiom, 'irreconcilables'. But then, it is easy to fling threats at militants in distant lands, especially since the delivery part of these threats is to be done by the army. Dealing with political militants closer to home is a different ball game. It requires grit, courage, vision, and more importantly, capacity and competence.

The present government does not have these traits. What it does have is stale rhetoric about its popularity in Sindh which, the nation has discovered repeatedly in the last three years, is not enough to eliminate organised mafias.

More scandalous is the fact that after Karachi's wanton bloodletting, the government (inclusive of the president) has not shown any serious intent in organising even band-aid efforts to stabilise the situation. The spurt of violence erupted and petered out, as it always does, only to resurface without the government doing anything visibly effective.

Little was done to reassure the scared-to-death citizens of Karachi that there is a government in place — that the state had not been hijacked by vested interests. No wonder, then, that while people were being mowed down on the streets of Karachi like stray animals, all that millions of concerned citizens could do was to extensively exchange messages praying to Allah to 'save the city'. No one had any hope that this government is in any way capable of doing anything to salvage the situation. If that is not a no-confidence vote for a government, what is?

The dark irony is that even when the government has only itself to blame for being unable to protect thousands of innocent citizens, it is not short on excuses to explain away its failures. Far from feeling ashamed or disgraced, it is playing the victim and asking for support. Now that is art, perfected at the cost of innocent blood. Perhaps in his next speech, President Zardari can offer tutorials to his opponents in the useful skill of how not to govern.

The writer is a senior journalist at DawnNews.