Part IV will examine that second bargain.9 EndnotesIkramul Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin (Lahore: Annoor Printers and Publishers, 1991), chapter 2, “Heroinisation and Militarisation,” digital copy, pp.

Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin, chapter 4, “The American Dilemma,” digital copy, pp.

United States Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, 100th Congress, 2nd session (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1988), available through the United States Department of Justice; Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin, chapter 4.

Part II ended with the machinery assembled for the anti-Soviet jihad: money, weapons, religious mobilisation, covert routes and armed intermediaries. What moved through that machinery? The answer is “heroin out, guns in”. It is memorable, but incomplete. It can suggest one barter arrangement directed by one agency. The record supports a more disturbing conclusion. Narcotics and arms became mutually protective businesses inside a political order that valued deniability above law.

Pakistan was apparently heroin-free in 1979. The same year brought a bumper poppy crop, officially estimated at about 800 metric tonnes, and the Prohibition (Enforcement of Hadd) Order, 1979. Prices rose sharply in the settled areas and collapsed in parts of the tribal belt. Surplus opium, international expertise and demand for a more concentrated commodity encouraged processing close to the source. Within two years, official estimates recorded at least 25,000 heroin users in Pakistan, including 10,000 to 15,000 in Karachi.1

The Soviet invasion did not create poppy. It changed the economy surrounding it. War devastated agriculture, displaced communities and rewarded anything portable and valuable. Afghanistan’s estimated opium output rose from roughly 300 tonnes in 1978 to about 4,500 tonnes in 1999. That fifteen-fold increase cannot be explained by Afghan soil. It reflected the markets, protection and disorder built around a prolonged international war.2

Processing opium into heroin near the source transformed the arithmetic. A smaller, more valuable load was easier to conceal and export. Laboratories, couriers and buyers could be placed along routes already carrying fighters, refugees, cash and supplies. The terrain that made covert war possible also reduced risk for traffickers. Secrecy became part of the infrastructure.

Arms travelling inward altered power just as profoundly. Weapons supplied for resistance to Soviet occupation passed through institutions and commanders whose authority grew with their control over distribution. Parallel markets expanded........

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