Part II ended with the machinery assembled for the anti-Soviet jihad: money, weapons, religious mobilisation, covert routes and armed intermediaries. What moved through that machinery? The answer is “heroin out, guns in”. It is memorable, but incomplete. It can suggest one barter arrangement directed by one agency. The record supports a more disturbing conclusion. Narcotics and arms became mutually protective businesses inside a political order that valued deniability above law.

Pakistan was apparently heroin-free in 1979. The same year brought a bumper poppy crop, officially estimated at about 800 metric tonnes, and the Prohibition (Enforcement of Hadd) Order, 1979. Prices rose sharply in the settled areas and collapsed in parts of the tribal belt. Surplus opium, international expertise and demand for a more concentrated commodity encouraged processing close to the source. Within two years, official estimates recorded at least 25,000 heroin users in Pakistan, including 10,000 to 15,000 in Karachi.¹

The Soviet invasion did not create poppy. It changed the economy surrounding it. War devastated agriculture, displaced communities and rewarded anything portable and valuable. Afghanistan’s estimated opium output rose from roughly 300 tonnes in 1978 to about 4,500 tonnes in 1999. That fifteen-fold increase cannot be explained by Afghan soil. It reflected the markets, protection and disorder built around a prolonged international war.²

Processing opium into heroin near the source transformed the arithmetic. A smaller, more valuable load was easier to conceal and export. Laboratories, couriers and buyers could be placed along routes already carrying fighters, refugees, cash and supplies. The terrain that made covert war possible also reduced risk for traffickers. Secrecy became part of the infrastructure.

Arms travelling inward altered power just as profoundly. Weapons supplied for resistance to Soviet occupation passed through institutions and commanders whose authority grew with their control over distribution. Parallel markets expanded around the official pipeline. A report cited in Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin described hashish and arms trading in the border territories as “inextricably linked”. Foreign currency was required for weapons, government control was weak and some middlemen served both markets.³

The phrase “heroin out, guns in” describes circulation, not a ledger in which every rifle was exchanged for a packet of heroin. Some Afghan commanders were reported to have acknowledged using opium profits to sustain the war. Others depended on foreign aid, taxation, donations or local support. Treating every mujahid as a trafficker would be false. Ignoring the commanders, brokers and protectors who profited from narcotics would be equally false.

Washington’s contradiction lay in the hierarchy of its objectives. It publicly pursued a war on drugs while privately demanding maximum pressure on the Soviet Union. A 1986 congressional report, quoted in our first book, observed that intelligence and drug-enforcement priorities were working against each other in the region. The wider United States Senate inquiry into drugs and foreign policy later exposed the recurring danger of covert relationships with suspected traffickers.⁴

The evidence does not prove that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) designed Pakistan’s heroin epidemic or controlled the regional drug trade. That sweeping allegation is unnecessary. The defensible charge is that narcotics control remained subordinate when it threatened a strategically useful alliance, commander or route. This was not proof of one grand conspiracy. It was proof of a policy hierarchy in which the declared war on drugs could be sacrificed to the covert war against communism.

Pakistan’s rulers made their own choices. General Ziaul Haq’s regime converted geography into rent and military rule into strategic indispensability. Weapons and money arrived without democratic scrutiny. Selected non-state actors gained legitimacy and coercive capacity. Smugglers learned that influence mattered more than concealment. Officials learned that an investigation could be stopped by invoking national security. Illegality grew through permissions rationed by the state.

Protection was the decisive commodity. A trafficker needed laboratories and transport, but above all he needed certainty that a consignment, financier or patron would remain beyond effective inquiry. Armed commanders could secure territory.

Corrupt officials could wave vehicles through, disclose enforcement plans or weaken prosecutions. Business fronts could absorb proceeds. Political patrons could turn criminal wealth into social respectability. Once these functions connected, narcotics became capital and arms became insurance.

This explains why seizures never told the whole story. A captured courier proved movement, not ownership. A destroyed laboratory proved production, not its protectors. The State displayed narcotics and rifles while beneficial owners, financiers and official facilitators remained invisible. Enforcement concentrated on the replaceable edge of the market and left its command structure intact.

Pakistan paid twice. Heroin exported abroad returned as addiction at home, while weapons supplied for one battlefield entered private disputes, criminal markets and sectarian violence. Our 1991 study described this conjunction as “heroinisation and militarisation”. It was not a literary flourish. Drug money created a new class of influence, inflated property and commerce, corrupted public institutions and helped make the Kalashnikov an instrument of everyday authority.⁵

The Soviet withdrawal did not close the routes or disarm those who controlled them. In 1993, road crews entering the Tirah Valley were reportedly attacked by drug lords using submachine guns, mortars and even a heat-seeking missile. The episode captured the reversal. Weapons introduced to defeat a superpower were now protecting heroin laboratories against the Pakistani State. The covert pipeline had acquired a private afterlife.⁶

Afghanistan’s civil war deepened that afterlife. Outside states continued to arm clients, and Pakistan’s support for the Taliban helped a new movement inherit much of the old logistical geography. Human Rights Watch documented the role of Pakistan, Russia and Iran in fuelling the conflict. The actors and alliances changed, while the principle remained: armed proxies received protection because patrons considered them strategically useful.⁷

Our original thesis must therefore be sharpened. Pakistan was not a “narco-state” because every institution trafficked drugs or every official took a share. It was becoming one because access to law was unequal, strategic labels shielded selected actors and illicit fortunes could purchase influence. The essential relationship was not always direct partnership. It was selective impunity.

This refinement also clarifies narcoterrorism. The term should not allege that every militant attack is financed by a particular drug shipment. It describes an ecosystem in which traffickers and armed groups can share routes, brokers, informal finance, weapons and protection without sharing a single command. Later assessments found precisely such exchanges: traffickers supplied arms, transport, money and protection, while armed actors secured territory and facilitated smuggling.⁸

The war economy’s greatest victory was respectability. A gunrunner could become a political intermediary. A trafficker’s capital could enter property, trade and election finance. A commander could be renamed a statesman when policy required his services. Crime became a method of accumulating lawful-looking power. This is the bridge from drug-trap to debt-trap: private fortunes escaped accountability while the public borrowed to repair the damage.

Those who went to wage holy war against communism, as Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin warned, brought home heroin. They also brought home weapons, protected networks and the doctrine that some crimes become acceptable when committed for a strategic cause. That doctrine survived the Soviet Union. After 9/11, the United States and Pakistan would revive it under a new vocabulary, rehabilitating warlords and again subordinating narcotics control to immediate military necessity. Part IV will examine that second bargain.⁹

Endnotes

1. Ikramul Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin (Lahore: Annoor Printers and Publishers, 1991), chapter 2, “Heroinisation and Militarisation,” digital copy, pp. 5–7.
2. United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Afghanistan’s Narco War: Breaking the Link Between Drug Traffickers and Insurgents, staff report, 111th Congress, 1st session (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2009), official text.
3. Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin, chapter 4, “The American Dilemma,” digital copy, pp. 12–14.
4. United States Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, 100th Congress, 2nd session (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1988), available through the United States Department of Justice; Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin, chapter 4.
5. Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin, chapters 2, 4 and 12.
6. John Ward Anderson, “Pervasive Heroin Traffic Putting Pakistan at Risk”, The Washington Post, April 29, 1993.
7. Human Rights Watch, Crisis of Impunity: The Role of Pakistan, Russia, and Iran in Fueling the Civil War in Afghanistan, July 2001.
8. Christopher M. Blanchard, Afghanistan: Narcotics and U.S. Policy, Congressional Research Service, September 26, 2006, pp. 18–20, report
9. Ikramul Haq, Pakistan: From Drug-trap to Debt-trap, edited by Huzaima Bukhari (Lahore: Lahore Law Publications, 2003), Preface, pp. xiii–xiv.

[To be continued]

Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, writer, literary critic, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds an LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.