Pakistan’s Narco-Terrorism Project Can Disrupt Regional Peace and Stability
The use of narcotics as a tool of statecraft is no longer a marginal feature of Pakistan’s behaviour towards India and the Indian subcontinent region. It has become a structural component of its sub-conventional warfare doctrine against its regional adversaries. What began in the early 1980s as a marriage of convenience between the Pakistani security establishment and the mujahideen pipeline has matured into an organised, multi-route, multi-modal enterprise that fuses heroin, methamphetamine, drone logistics, hawala finance and transnational criminal syndicates with terrorist groups operating in the region. The pattern is no longer disputed in serious policy quarters internationally. It has been documented by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), corroborated in Indian agency chargesheets, and admitted, in unguarded moments, by senior Pakistani politicians themselves.
The geographical anchor of the problem is the Golden Crescent, the opium-producing belt comprising Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. UNODC’s data show that even after the Taliban’s 2022 ban produced a 95 percent collapse in Afghan opium cultivation in 2023, the trafficking networks that move opiates through Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, and onward via the Makran coast, remain intact. Existing stockpiles, methamphetamine produced from the ephedra plant, and the diversification into synthetic drugs have prevented any meaningful contraction of the southern trafficking route. Pakistan’s own Anti-Narcotics Force has acknowledged seizing more than 360 metric tonnes of narcotics in 2024 alone, a figure that, by its very magnitude, betrays the scale of the throughput rather than the success of interdiction.
Pakistan’s involvement is not accidental geography, but a state-defined policy since the 1980s. In 1994, Nawaz Sharif disclosed in a media interview that during his earlier tenure, the army establishment had presented him with a formal plan to finance covert operations in Kashmir and Punjab through the sale of heroin. The American assessments in the 1990s named the same nexus. Three decades later, the operational logic is unchanged; only the technology has evolved. The data from the Indian government demonstrate a clear escalation. For example, Indian security forces seized 517 kg of heroin along the Punjab frontier in 2020, more than double the 227 kg seized in 2019. Drone interdictions, almost negligible until 2020, rose to 22 in 2022, then 107 in 2023, then 294 in 2024, and crossed 272 drones with over 367 kg of heroin in the first eleven months of 2025 in Punjab alone. The Narcotics Control Bureau’s all-India report, released in 2025, recorded 179 drone-based trafficking cases along the India-Pakistan border in 2024, compared with just 3 in 2021. Synthetic drug seizures across the country rose from 1,890 kg in 2019 to 11,994 kg in 2024, and maritime seizures along the western coast surged nearly 500-fold over the same period. These desperate attempts by Pakistan to use cross-border narcotics trafficking are done to create instability in the western border regions of India.
Security agencies have documentation of Pakistan-backed “K-2” alignment that fuses Khalistan-oriented operators with Kashmiri, LeT, and Jaish modules and funds them through narcotics revenue, which is the Indian face of a project whose other faces lie in Maputo, Mombasa, Mirpur, Colombo, and Antwerp. Despite international examples of maritime seizures, Pakistan’s own prosecutorial follow-through has been minimal, with only a handful of the eighteen major hauls claimed by Islamabad between 2019 and 2024 producing publicised convictions.
The narco network in Pakistan is mostly run by criminal syndicates and gangsters who are aided and abetted by local security and intelligence agencies. It is a ‘give-and-take’ relationship, wherein Pakistan’s security establishment uses local criminal networks as a shield to traffic illegal drugs in the neighbouring countries and Europe to create instability, earn money, and create local networks in those countries. Additionally, Pakistan has been trying to use the maritime route in parallel with the better-known land and air vectors into the Indian border regions and other countries. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime has documented that the crews of stateless vessels involved in narcotics trafficking are predominantly Pakistani, and their identification is routinely obfuscated by the absence of documents.
Notably, the eastern African coast has emerged as the principal landing zone of this maritime traffic. In the past, several Pakistani vessels were seized in the same region for carrying illegal narcotics. Further south, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have become transit and destination markets. The Sri Lankan Navy seized 605 kilograms of crystal meth and 579 kilograms of ketamine from a single vessel whose nine crew members were Pakistani nationals. Europe remains the apex destination for Pakistani traffickers. UK Border Force and the National Crime Agency have recorded a sustained rise in heroin parcels and container loads arriving directly from Pakistan, with consignments concealed in chili powder sacks, surgical instruments, towels, and even boxing gloves. The famous 2019 Felixstowe seizure of 398 kilograms of heroin worth £40 million, routed onward to Antwerp and Rotterdam, illustrates how the Makran narco pipeline in Pakistan converges with continental European distribution networks. Several reports have claimed British-Pakistani trafficking diasporas operating out of Mirpur (in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir) and Peshawar, exploiting the postal system on an industrial scale.
As a result, the strategic implication of Pakistani narco networks is regional and global. Pakistan has built a low-cost, high-deniability instrument that simultaneously funds terrorism in the region, degrades the social fabric of the Indian Ocean littoral, exports societal harm to Europe, and is now used, through choreographed seizures, as a compliance theatre for the Financial Action Task Force and the International Monetary Fund. So long as the Pakistani deep state continues to treat narcotics revenue as a permissible substitute for the foreign assistance it no longer commands, the subcontinent will face a slow-burning crisis that crosses the lines between organised crime, terrorism and public health. A regional response anchored in maritime interdiction, anti-drone capabilities, disruption of hawala channels, and sustained diplomatic pressure through the FATF and UNODC is no longer optional. It is the minimum condition for regional stability.
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