THE world is increasingly beginning to view organised crime (OC) as a serious global threat. It is not simply a law-and-order problem, but a cancer that is rapidly metastasising to vital parts of the state, including the economy, governance and national security.

Many countries, such as the UK and Australia, have quantified the cost of OC, which is an essential step towards understanding and combating it. For instance, the UK has estimated that the cost of OC it had to bear was £37 billion in 2025. In Australia, it was estimated to be $82bn annually. It has been generally accepted that a consolidated cost estimate of the harm caused by all manner of OC is not merely an academic exercise but an essential tool for designing, prioritising and implementing national strategies.

Sadly, Pakistan, which, according to the Global Organised Crime Index 2025, is among the countries most vulnerable to such crime, lacks this tool without which it cannot formulate a holistic national strategy against OC. There is a need to remedy matters. The existing system in Pakistan for evaluating the cost of harm caused by OC suffers from two main shortcomings. One, all the relevant departments dealing with OC, whether at the federal or provincial level, work in silos. These departments often have their own national risk assessment estimates, limited to crimes within their respective purview. There is no cross-departmental, integrated, national estimate of harm from all types of OC. Thus, we don’t have the broader picture of OC’s dominance in........

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