A narcotics consignment does not need to carry a terrorist flag to finance violence. The connection is often misunderstood because investigators, politicians and commentators look for a single ledger: heroin sold, money transferred, bomb purchased. Illicit economies rarely oblige with such tidy accounts. They operate through markets in transport, protection, weapons, influence and silence.

Our 1991 study described Pakistan’s crisis as the conjunction of “heroinisation and militarisation”. It did not claim that every trafficker was a militant or every militant a trafficker. It showed something more durable.

Drug money could buy armed protection, political access and social respectability. Weapons introduced for a foreign battlefield could protect laboratories, routes and private fortunes. By 2003, the drug-trap had become a debt-trap; after 9/11, both were absorbed into a security economy that paid handsomely for managing danger without removing its sources.¹

Part VII ended with four questions: who holds the gun, who receives the money, who can stop an investigation and whose child walks safely to school? Narcoterrorism begins where the answers overlap. It does not require a supreme commander sitting above a pyramid. A farmer may know only the buyer. A transporter may carry several commodities.

A checkpoint may collect a toll without owning the cargo. A militant group may tax a route, rent protection or extort a trader. A broker may settle accounts through hawala. Property, gold or a lawful business may receive the proceeds. Each actor can deny knowledge of the whole while keeping the whole alive.

This is why the phrase “narcoterrorism” must be used with care. Used recklessly, it turns suspicion into proof and converts an entire border population into a security category. Used precisely, it identifies a political economy in which drug trafficking and armed violence share routes, protection and financial services.

The relationship may be direct, indirect or merely opportunistic. What matters is evidence connecting particular actors, assets and transactions—not slogans attaching collective guilt to a province, tribe or refugee population.

Afghanistan’s recent experience demonstrates both the power and the limits of prohibition. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that poppy cultivation fell from about 232,000 hectares in 2022 to 10,800 in 2023 after the Taliban ban.

Cultivation rose to 12,800 hectares in 2024 and declined to 10,200 in 2025. Potential opium production in 2025 was estimated at 296 tonnes, capable of yielding roughly 22 to 34 tonnes of export-quality heroin.² That fall is real and should be acknowledged.

It is also not the same as the disappearance of the market. UNODC found that the 2025 trader price of dry opium, although lower than in 2024, remained more than five times the long-running pre-ban average. It identified several possible explanations for falling prices despite restricted new supply: release of stockpiles, market adjustment and production outside Afghanistan.

Stockpiling has softened supply shocks before. A crop count measures cultivation in one season; it does not count stored opium, concealed laboratories, adaptable routes or proceeds already converted into property and influence.³

The regional route obviously matters as much as the field. UNODC’s work on the Southern Route traces Afghan opiates and methamphetamine through Pakistan and Iran, across the Indian Ocean and towards markets in Africa, the Gulf and beyond. Its World Drug Report 2026 notes that almost two-thirds of global heroin and morphine seizures in 2024 occurred in Asia, particularly South-West Asia. Land and maritime channels remain dominant by volume, while smaller consignments complicate detection.⁴

Pakistan’s Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) reported seizures exceeding 177 metric tonnes of narcotics in 2024. A large seizure is neither proof of victory nor proof of official complicity. It establishes the scale of the enforcement burden.

The real test is what follows the photograph of the seized cargo. Was its owner identified? Were parallel financial investigations opened? Were transport companies, warehouses, bank accounts, hawala settlements, property purchases and beneficial owners traced? Was any public protector prosecuted? A tonne destroyed without a network dismantled may become only a cost of doing business.⁵

Pakistan’s own risk record supports this approach. The 2019 mutual evaluation by the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering, endorsed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), identified drug trafficking, smuggling, kidnapping for ransom, extortion, illegal arms sales and exploitation of hawala or hundi among the country’s high-risk threats.

It recorded drug trafficking as a primary source of terrorist financing identified by Pakistan’s National Risk Assessment. It also found that Pakistan was both a destination and trans-shipment country, while illicit proceeds commonly entered real estate, precious metals, jewellery and formal or informal finance.⁶

The most revealing numbers concerned follow-through. Only about one per cent of suspicious transaction reports analysed and disseminated as financial intelligence related to drug trafficking, despite its designation as a principal money-laundering predicate. Between 2014 and 2018, about US$19.08 million in drug-trafficking proceeds was frozen, but only approximately US$588,000—three per cent—was confiscated by court order. The assessment concluded that the amounts were low compared with the threat.

Pakistan later made substantial technical progress and by 2022 had 38 FATF recommendations rated compliant or largely compliant. Technical compliance was necessary. It cannot substitute for controllers convicted, assets finally confiscated and protection withdrawn.⁷

The State’s institutions still tend to see fragments. The ANF sees drugs. Customs sees cargo. The Financial Monitoring Unit sees suspicious transactions. Counterterrorism departments see militants. Provincial police see extortion and kidnapping. Tax authorities see undeclared assets. Land registries see property. When these records remain in separate rooms, the network enjoys unity while the State practises fragmentation.

Every major narcotics seizure should trigger a parallel financial and protection inquiry. Joint case teams must connect the consignment to its financier, transporter, communications, weapons, properties and officials.

Quarterly public reporting should disclose seizures by substance, money-laundering referrals, assets frozen, assets confiscated after judicial process, controllers convicted and cases involving public servants. Parliament should receive fuller classified details and examine whether enforcement is reaching organisers rather than carriers.

Policy must also distinguish survival from organised profit. Farmers deprived of a crop need credible alternatives; persons suffering addiction need treatment; refugees need lawful protection; border communities need roads, schools, courts and legitimate trade. Punishing the weakest participant while bargaining with the armed protector reproduces the very order being condemned. Equal law is not softness. It is the only strategy that denies every actor the expectation of selective immunity.

Narcoterrorism without a central command survives because no participant needs to control the entire chain. The courier is arrested; the route remains. The crop is destroyed; the stockpile is sold. The account is frozen; value moves through cash, gold or property. The gunman is killed; the protector and financier acquire new recruits. Uprooting this system requires the State to follow value, authority and protection together.

Part IX will examine its next mutation: from heroin and Kalashnikovs to synthetic drugs, drones and digital finance.⁸

Endnotes

1. Ikramul Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin (Lahore: Annoor Printers and Publishers, 1991), chapters 2, 4 and 12; Ikramul Haq, Pakistan: From Drug-trap to Debt-trap, edited by Huzaima Bukhari (Lahore: Lahore Law Publications, 2003), Preface, pp. xiii–xiv, and Epilogue, pp. 262–264.
2. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghanistan Opium Survey 2025, pp. 4–6 and 10–12.
3. UNODC, Afghanistan Opium Survey 2025, pp. 17–19; UNODC, Afghanistan Drug Insights, Volume 4: Drug trafficking and opiate stocks, 2025.
4. UNODC, Opiates and Methamphetamine Trafficking on the Southern Route; UNODC, World Drug Report 2026, sections on opiates, seizures and trafficking methods.
5. Anti-Narcotics Force Pakistan, “How Pakistan is fighting the global drug crisis”, April 14, 2025. The reported 177 metric tonnes covers narcotics seized in 2024 and is not a measure of the total illicit market.
6. Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering, Anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing measures—Pakistan: Mutual Evaluation Report, October 2019, pp. 7–8, 21–22 and 141–142.
7. Asia/Pacific Group, Pakistan Mutual Evaluation Report, pp. 55–56 and 69–71; Financial Action Task Force, Pakistan Follow-Up Report 2022, February 2022.
8. National Counter Terrorism Authority, “Revised National Action Plan, 2021”, especially the measures linking terrorist finance with narcotics, weapons and human trafficking.

[To be continued]

Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, 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