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.

17–19; UNODC, Afghanistan Drug Insights, Volume 4: Drug trafficking and opiate stocks, 2025.

UNODC, Opiates and Methamphetamine Trafficking on the Southern Route; UNODC, World Drug Report 2026, sections on opiates, seizures and trafficking methods.

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........

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