Heroin smoke rings and terror links

Numerous armed and non-state militant groups, have made Pakistan their homeland. The South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), of the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), discloses a bewildering number of terror organizations that are comfortably ensconced in that country. Classified under three broad headings as Proscribed Terrorist/Extremist Groups; Active Terrorist/Insurgent Groups and Inactive Terrorist/Insurgent Groups; a total number of 162 organizations figure in the list. These organizations are spread out in Baluchistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK), Gilgit-Baltistan, Punjab, and Sindh.

A US Congressional Report 'Terrorist and Other Militant Groups in Pakistan’ identifies 12 US-designated ‘foreign terrorist organizations’, classified as globally-oriented, Afghanistan oriented, India- and Kashmir-oriented, domestically oriented, and Sectarian (anti-Shia). According to a Global Watch Analysis study, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) aids and abets terrorism through terrorist organizations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM). According to author Roland Jacquard, there are more than 20 terrorist training centres functioning in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK). Hizb-ul Mujahideen, founded in 1989, the militant wing of Pakistan’s largest Islamist political party was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in 2017. It is one of the largest and oldest terrorist groups operating in Kashmir.

Harakat-ul Jihad Islami, formed in 1980, this group fought against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later redirected its efforts toward India. At present, HUJI operates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, and seeks annexation of Kashmir into Pakistan.

Harakat ul-Mujahadeen, another Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) operates mainly from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and from some Pakistani cities. It was responsible for the 1999 hijacking of an Indian airliner, which led to the release of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) future founder, Masood Azhar from an Indian prison. Azhar founded JeM in 2000 after a hostage exchange that freed him from an Indian prison in return for 155 people held on a hijacked aircraft. Pakistani authorities have linked JeM with two assassination bids on former President Pervez Musharraf in 2003 as well as the kidnap and murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, is an anti-Shia group established in Pakistan's Punjab in the mid-1980s. It mainly operates in the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Punjab, Balochistan, and Karachi.

There is no other country in the world accommodating such a bewildering number of terror organizations, and their member foreign terrorists. All of them are into hard-core terrorism, arms-trafficking and narco-trafficking. The Pakistani government, politicians, Army, Police, bureaucracy and the Inter-Services Intelligence

(ISI), are hand in glove with these terror organizations, and their dangerous nefarious activities.

India informed the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) Counter Terrorism Committee (CTC) that there has been a steep rise in cross-border terror activities in Jammu & Kashmir since the end of 2021, around the time when severe financial strictures by global terror-financing watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), were eased on a “troublesome jurisdiction”. However, recently the FATF removed Pakistan from the “grey list” of countries under “increased monitoring”. India informed the panel that terror activities had seen a slump from 2018 to the end of 2021, during which time Pakistan was placed on the grey list.

Terror groups around the world indulge in trafficking of narcotic drugs in order to be self-reliant as also not to be under the financial control of foreign governments and their intelligence agencies. Pakistan is no exception to this rule. As around 162 terror groups are functioning in Pakistan, financially supporting them is not a viable proposition, given the extremely precarious condition of the economy. On the economic front Pakistan is facing a Sri Lanka kind of situation, unable to pay its debts, critical on foreign reserves, and grappling with skyrocketing inflation. Hence the Pakistan government connives at the drug trafficking and drug consumption being indulged in by various terror groups.

Pakistan itself has made major drug seizures in 2022. At Torkham on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Customs seized a record 130 kilogram haul of heroin. October 2022 also saw one of the largest seizure of Methamphetamine in Peshawar. Police seized 80 kilograms of crystal meth or ‘ice-drug’, worth over a hundred million rupees, during a raid in Hayatabad locality. In May Pakistan’s Anti-Narcotics Force made a massive bust of more than one ton of Opiates and 255 kilograms of Meth in the province of Balochistan, while the Pakistani Navy intercepted 4.5 tons of drugs in the northern Arabian Sea. Pakistan is not only a transit country for methamphetamine leaving Afghanistan, but also a booming market for the drug, which is immensely popular among students. A rising number of people in Pakistan are using crystal methamphetamine, especially students and upper class.

Around 27 million people struggle with drug abuse in Pakistan. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Kashmir Valley has witnessed a 2,000 percent rise in heroin abuse in the last five years. The Valley has witnessed an alarming rise in drug addiction in all socioeconomic classes of the region and addicts seeking treatment breached the 10,000 mark in 2021. This alarming 2,000 percent spike in the last five years has sent shockwaves among government and security agencies. Srinagar, Anantnag, Shopian, Pulwama districts are highly affected by the surging drug menace, which are also prone to aggravated terror activities on a daily basis.

Curbing the drug menace, however, is difficult, as the India-Pakistan border also known as International Border (IB) stretches from Jammu and Kashmir at the north to the Zero Point between Gujarat in India and Sindh province in Pakistan. The total length of the India-Pakistan border is 3,323 kilometres.

In the narcotics trade it has started to resemble like the 1,951 mile U.S. – Mexico border. This South Texas border area is a principal drug smuggling corridor between the United States and Mexico. San Antonio serves as a transshipment center for cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine smuggled into the United States from Mexico. A similar scenario has unfolded along the Kashmir-Punjab border abutting Pakistan. Drugs are being transported by terrorists who also use underground tunnels, and of late drones are being used extensively to transport arms and drugs. Terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) have set up their camps only a few kilometres away from the Indian border.

A large number of trained cadres that left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover have also set up bases in Peshawar, Bahawalpur and Muzaffarabad and are waiting to infiltrate into Kashmir. Terror camps are reportedly being run in three clusters at Manshera, Muzaffarabad and Kotli in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Almost all terrorists have backgrounds in trafficking or both trafficking and consumption of synthetic drugs. However, easy availability of Afghan Heroin makes it the favorite drug of terrorists in Pakistan. Heroin consumption among youth in Kashmir is being encouraged by terror groups and the ISI.

Whether in Kashmir or elsewhere, the interests of ideology-driven terrorists and money-driven drug traders have multiple goals. Drug trafficking — in source countries, transit countries, and consumer countries, supplement the problems of terror in different ways. The Pakistani terror infrastructure manages supplying cash for terror operations; creating mayhem in countries where drugs are produced and through which they pass, spreading corruption in law enforcement, military, and other governmental institutions in ways that either build public support for terrorist-linked groups or weaken the capacity of enforcement agencies to combat terrorist organizations and actions; supporting a common infrastructure that helps in illicit arms acquisition, money laundering, false identification and for building up facilities for sleeper cells. Kashmir is facing all these problems, and the citizens are tormented by religious ideology, fundamentalism, and apathy of the well-entrenched local political families.

While drug dealing generates a cash economy from source to street, terrorism hardly generates any money on its own, except by way of extortion. This is why terrorism needs governmental support or covert funding by intelligence agencies like ISI of Pakistan.

In the current national security environment, there is little question that narco-terrorism is among the gravest of threats. Massive resources throughout the government have been allocated and re-allocated to the task of preventing and interdicting narco- terrorism, yet it continues to be intractable. Given the critical situation a separate Ministry of Narcotics Interdiction appears to be a dire necessity for better coordination among the multiple enforcement and intelligence agencies.