Veiled by the great emptiness, the Baluch smuggler convoys eluded the gaze of three empires, silently cutting across the mountains of Zarghun Ghar and Safed Koh onto the coast of Makran. Liquor, opium, automobile parts, sewing machines and silk flowed across British India’s North West Frontier into Persia and Afghanistan. Local merchants even refused to purchase legally-imported sugar. In a single week in the summer of 1932, a hundred thousand silver pieces were sent from Zahedan to settle accounts, British administrators recorded.
Even though the smugglers could face execution, imperial law was defeated by native cunning. The nephew of the chieftain Idu Khan worked for the British Customs Frontier Guards, historian Mikiya Koyagi writes, while his son-in-law was employed by the Persian king’s Zahedan Road Guards Department.
A century on, the modern inheritors of those networks are sending a tidal wave of Afghan-made drugs washing over the Indian Ocean. Last week, a French warship operating in a multinational mission in the Gulf of Oman reported seizures of drugs with an estimated street value of $108 million. Earlier in the month, Indian naval operations led to the seizure of a staggering 2,500 kilograms of methamphetamine and heroin.
Tons of narcotics stamped with Afghan cartel trademarks—Pegasus, the winged horse; the rampant eagle; the scorpion—have been showing up in European ports like Felixstowe, Antwerp and Rotterdam, ingeniously packed into legitimate container shipments.
Like their colonial-era ancestors, smugglers are the economic backbone of impoverished communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned that, despite a fitful Taliban ban, Afghan opium sowing had reached record levels. Ensconced in the political system, and cocooned by Pakistan’s intelligence services, the cartels responsible for bringing that harvest to ports in Baluchistan and the wider world.
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The pirate ports
Figuring mostly in the footnotes of history—its pirate navy once attracted the wrath of Portuguese imperial forces in 1582, and a sack by tribal rebels in 1898—the tiny Baluch fishing town of Pasni has turned its obscurity into an asset. Elite clans like the Bizenjos and Kalmati long dominated the town, which has a population of just 35,000, serving as key elements of the slave trade operated by the Sultan of Oman. Later, they owned the fishing boats that trawled the rich estuary of the Shadi river.
Led by the ganglord Seth Gunj Bakhsh and his brothers Seth Murad Jan and Imam Bakhsh Fauji, the fishing fleet of Pasni and Lasbela today form the backbone of the Afghan drug trade. Heroin and methamphetamines arriving from Afghanistan, are stored in Pasni, and then transferred by fishing boats onto larger ships, or delivered at small ports across the Indian Ocean rim.
Ten men arrested by the Gujarat Police last year on the al-Soheili, a fishing boat carrying 40 kilograms of heroin, were all fishing-fleet workers from hamlets around Pasni, police records show. Zubair Drakshshandeh, arrested in last week’s Indian naval operations, is alleged to have received some ₹5 lakh per trip—a small fraction of the ₹2,500 crore street value of the methamphetamine he carried would.
For many impoverished people in the region, running heroin is just part of a larger fabric of trafficking that forms the backbone of the local economy, Kiyya Baloch and Niaz Lashari write. Eleven million litres of fuel are estimated to be smuggled out of Iran into Pakistan each year. Following the killing of several fuel smugglers in 2021, large-scale rioting broke out in Iranian Sistan-Baluchestan, with angry residents attempting to storm government buildings and police stations.
Each part of the shipment of narcotics from Afghanistan involves low-grade but reliable economic activity. The cartels which provide farmers with advances to grow opium and ephedra work alongside the Taliban, their dollar revenues holding up its jihadist proto-state. The cartels also have to arrange for the procurement of chemicals like acetic anhydrite, ammonium chloride and sulphur from Pakistan. There are drug cooks,
Turbat’s Overseas Colony—home to dozens of mansions covered in glazed tiles—is home to many of the top traffickers, journalist Umer Farooq reported. Their guests, police discovered in the course of raids, included hostages from Tanzanians, Nigerians, Yemenis, and Iranians, kept as human collateral until their cartels paid for the delivery of drugs. Terrorist groups often provide the cartels with security—in return for a fee.
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The narco-state
Even though low-grade opium trafficking had been part of the borderlands for centuries, the industrial production of heroin began after 1979, when Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate began encouraging jihadist groups to raise cash by running drugs. General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s regime, expert David Winston records, “fostered an ecosystem of government protection of heroin dealers, government officials profiting off of the heroin trade, and significant political influence of heroin syndicates in the government.”
Following the rise of the first Taliban emirate, the cartels became institutionalised. The mujahideen commander Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, expert Gretchen Peters reports, even threatened farmers who refused to plant poppies with castration.
The trafficking lines to Europe ran north, through Iran into eastern Turkey and from central Asia to Russia. Fugitive ganglord Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar’s cartel pioneered the use of Indian Ocean routes to reach European markets, often transiting through East Africa.
Exposes in the media, revealing the existence of ISI-backed heroin laboratories across Pakistan’s North-West, led to public demands for action against heroin claiming the lives of young people in the West. Little was done, though. Then prime minister, Benazir Bhutto sometimes threw Washington a bone, extraditing notorious traffickers like Mohammed Anwar Khattak and Mirza Iqbal Baig. Few of the big cartel operators, though, were touched.
Former military ruler General Pervez Musharraf’s ally Mir Imam Bizenjo—better known as Imam Bheel—would later be named the head of one of the world’s top four cartels. Waris Khan Afridi, appointed minister for tribal affairs by prime minister Bhutto, was later arrested for trafficking heroin. Haji Ayub Afridi, another notable narcotics boss, became a key figure in Nawaz Sharif’s Islami Jamhoori Ittehad.
In spite of Imam Bheel’s international narcotics designation, he continues to be an influential businessman, investing in military-linked real estate projects at Kalmat Khor, near Pasni, journalist Maqbool Ahmad has revealed.
Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif would later allege that he had been approached by army chief of staff Lieutenant-General Mirza Aslam Beg and ISI director-general Asad Durrani to authorise large-scale drug deals to fund “a series of covert military operations in desperate need of money.”
The culture of impunity is still deeply embedded in Pakistan. Karachi businessman Jabir ‘Motiwala’ Siddiq, alleged to have invested cartel funds in property and the stock market, secured the support of the Pakistan Government for his efforts to avoid extradition to the United States.
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A Grim Future?
Efforts to destroy the drug industry through military force have, generally, been ineffective. Economist David Mansfield calculated in 2019 that air raids targeting Afghan drug processing plants—crude facilities using little more than a few metal pots and a heat source—rarely inflicted significant losses. The anti-narcotics air missions, though, often cost millions of dollars. The main methamphetamine trading hub at Abdul Wadood Bazaar expanded after bombing raids, satellite imaging showed.
The implosion of the state in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the work of scholar Shehryar Fazli shows, could make counter-narcotics efforts even more complicated. Formal policing is already extremely limited in Baluchistan, he points out, with the state subcontracting operations to tribal groups—many complicit in the narcotics trade.
Like imperial authorities discovered a century ago, it’s hard to fight markets—even for goods as malevolent as drugs. In countries like Portugal, authorities have registered success by decriminalising the use of drugs for personal use and focussing on demand reduction. The demand-reduction effort, economists Sonia Felix, Pedro Portugal and Ana Tavares have shown, led to a reduction in trafficking.
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Afghanistan operations, Charles Cogan, later told journalist Loretta Nepoleoni that the United States sacrificed its war on drugs to win the Cold War. The hundreds of thousands of young lives still being destroyed by methamphetamines and heroin show how tainted that victory was.
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(Edited by Theres Sudeep)