DESPERATE or determined, they are certainly being exploited by unscrupulous elements.

The devastating loss of 15 young men from Punjab, killed in Balochistan while apparently following a human smuggling path to Iran and then onwards to Europe, has shone a harsh light on a murky business that the state appears to have done little to combat.

The scale of the human smuggling operation can be gauged from a single statistic provided by a security official: this year alone, Iran has handed over 19,000 Pakistanis who crossed over the border illegally.

Presumably, a great many of those individuals have been the victims of human smuggling operations that appear to have concentrated their recruitment activities in a few districts of Punjab.

A predictable combination of poverty and the often false promise of better earning opportunities in the West allows criminal gangs to prey on the hopes of young men, whose families often go deep into debt to finance an uncertain journey towards what they believe is a better life.

Deterring individuals seeking a better life for themselves is harder than the obvious alternative: cracking down on the criminal networks that exploit desperate families and leave young men vulnerable to arrest, deportation and even death.

The Punjab government has reacted predictably to the gruesome killing of its denizens in Balochistan by rounding up a few alleged human smugglers and so-called agents who helped send the young men to what turned out to be their deaths.

But almost as predictably, once the media attention disappears, the criminal gangs and recruiters will quietly resurface and resume their operations.

To be effective, there has to be a long-term strategy that attacks systematically each step of the human smuggling operations: from recruitment in the towns and villages to better patrolling along the smuggling routes to border cooperation with Iran and Afghanistan.

The state must also consider working with local communities to educate them about the dangers involved in human smuggling. Simply losing lives or having financial futures destroyed is unacceptable.

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2017