WHAT may appear as disparate events carried out by separate criminal syndicates are in fact manifestations of the overarching phenomenon of organised crime. For instance, the recent devastating floods in Swat, often attributed to climatic changes alone, were also driven by deforestation at the hands of the timber mafia. Similarly, the Lahore floods this year were caused not only by poor urban planning but also the illegal blocking of the city’s natural water courses by influential land grabbers.

In 2023, 350 Pakistanis drowned in a boat incident near Greece while being illegally smuggled into Europe. In another instance, the US INCS report of 2025 says that “mass quantities of drugs transit Pakistan’s maritime domain freely”, thanks to powerful transnational drug mafias. Widespread financial crimes in Pakistan, like money laundering and illicit financial flows, remain largely undiagnosed and undetected, eroding our economy, governance and national security. The US State Department estimates that around $10 billion is illegally funnelled out of Pakistan each year. This money is either obtained through corruption by public officials or are the proceeds of crime by powerful criminals, and sent abroad without detection.

As stated by Moisés Naím in Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, “Organised crime should not be understood as isolated cartels but as pipelines through which illicit goods — drugs, arms, humans, illicit money — flow across borders and jurisdictions, often using the same routes and facilitators”.

In Pakistan, sadly, the state has consistently misdiagnosed them as isolated crimes rather than as interconnected criminal enterprises, facilitated by powerful state-embedded actors. Consequently, the pipelines of organised criminal networks stay largely intact, while law-enforcement agencies focus mostly on the arrest of their foot soldiers in sporadic raids. Targeting this wide spectrum of organised crime requires prioritisation according to the extent of harm caused, which requires an accurate diagnosis of the risk, based on data and evidence.

As the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime states, “Data is power in the fight against organised crime”. It follows that unless we plug the existing gaps in data collection and analyses, our diagnosis of organised crime in Pakistan shall continue to be inaccurate. The gaps in the diagnosis of organised crime in the country can be broadly divided into two categories — national and institutional.

Strong political will is needed to combat crime syndicates.

Since globally organised crime syndicates infiltrate government and political systems, strong political will is needed to combat them. In Pakistan, many cases have been reported in the media about how different types of mafias allegedly exert influence on official policymaking, like the sugar mafia, money laundering cartels etc. A case in point is Khanani & Kalia International, a Karachi-based, money-laundering syndicate, which was involved in worldwide transactions worth billions of dollars annually.

The arrest of its directors by FIA in 2008 and their subsequent acquittal by the court in 2011 indicates how the prosecution of powerful cartels works in Pakistan. There were reports of billions changing hands. Meanwhile, another director at KKI was arrested in the US in 2015 and convicted in 2017 for running a global money-laundering syndicate from Karachi worth billions of dollars annually. KKI was declared a transnational criminal organisation. Thus, the political will to address the challenge is uneven and depends on how politically powerful criminal networks are and what kind of organised crime they are involved in. Political will across the board to address all forms of organised crime is missing.

Meanwhile, the institutional response is fragmented. Institutions dealing with various forms of organised crime work in silos. Not only does this hinder the identification of cross-crime networks, it also results in two major gaps in diagnosing organised crime.

The first is the lack of a standardised national format for data maintenance by institutions dealing with different forms of organised crime, which impedes a uniform, holistic threat analysis across all institutions. Access to available data is limited, obstructing an objective and independent analysis of the issue.

Second, an essential aspect of diagnosing organised crime networks is accurate identification of corrupt public officials, or in the words of FATF, ‘politically exposed persons’ who may be facilitators of organised crime. The IMF is reported to have shared a draft with the Pakistan government in August 2025, pointing out that our system to identify politically exposed persons is “uneven”, implying that the more powerful you are, the less likely you are to be identified.

A multidimensional effort is needed to improve the diagnosis of organised crime in the country.

One, there is an urgent need to emphasise the gravity of the cross-sectoral impact of organised crime, which is missing in our national discourse. As per the UNODC, “harm caused by organised crime lies in its ability to simultaneously damage economies, weaken governance, fuel corruption, erode security and inflict severe social harm”. If left unchecked, it is likely to continue encroaching upon all segments of society, and as stated by Cornelis Roelofse, it can lead the country into “criminotocracy”, ie, “a system of governance where organised crime, governance and business, use the system for self-enrichment and manipulate the elections to remain in power”.

Two, the recently set-up Anti Money Laundering Authority should have adequate powers to meaningfully coordinate between different powerful stakeholders. For starters, it should draw up, in consultation with all relevant institutions, standardised formats of data maintenance to facilitate a holistic and comprehensive analysis of all forms of organised crimes in Pakistan, the harm these cause and their pipelines.

Similarly, the FATF’s 12th recommendation makes it mandatory for all relevant institutions in every country to improve systems to identify politically exposed persons. There is, thus, a need to get our act together before the FATF takes it up as a cause of concern.

The Global Organised Crime Index, 2023, rated Pakistan as a high-risk country with low resilience to deal with organised crime. That should ring alarm bells for course correction. It is for us to decide, whether we opt to identify and rein in these monstrous criminal syndicates, or allow ourselves to turn into a criminotocracy.

The writer is a former director general, Federal Investigation Authority, Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, October 30th, 2025