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 Pakistan. Second, LEAs dealing with OCs in Pakistan often view these crimes through a narrow law-enforcement lens and therefore measure them using law-and-order metrics, such as the number of criminal cases registered, raids conducted, and arrests and seizures made. This approach, though important, overlooks the quantification of a much graver and wider harm caused by a variety of OC to our economy, governance and national security. For instance, in the case of narcotics trafficking, our assessment is confined to arrests, seizures, etc, while the more harmful costs like impact on the economy, health, infiltration into legitimate business, terrorist financing, etc, are not counted. Thus, our existing assessment system provides only a partial picture of the actual harm caused by OC and fails to identify all beneficiaries of the crimes. The cumulative effect of these two major gaps is that we don’t have an accurate total cost estimate of the harm caused by OC or knowledge of facilitating factors.
Basing our national anti-OC strategy on an incomplete risk assessment is likely to adversely affect its efficacy. There are three main areas of concern. One, it leads to the reduced importance of OC at the policymaking level. Pakistan is a resource-constrained country, and many national challenges vie for a share of the funds and priority. We need data to support the claim that OC is a more serious threat to getting a seat at the table. Since we don’t have a figure indicating the total cost of the harm caused by OC, combating it doesn’t receive the importance it deserves at the policymaking level.
A consolidated cost estimate of the harm caused by organised crime is essential for designing national strategies.
Two, the political economy of organised crime is one of its main drivers. It needs to be borne in mind that, like elsewhere, OC in Pakistan survives, not because of weak laws but political patronage, bureaucratic collusion, an ineffective judiciary, widespread corruption and powerful criminal networks. Having an across-the-board, independent, holistic total cost of OC in the country would help uncover the political economy of OC by identifying the entire network of crime, its real beneficiaries and its nexus with political and economic systems, without exception. It will also improve the transparency of measures taken by the government. In the existing system of partial risk assessment, these important enablers of OC in Pakistan remain hidden in the shadows, confining government efforts to tackle OC to the arrest of the latter’s foot soldiers and minor seizures. Thus, incomplete data is an important factor in determining the effectiveness of our national strategy.
Three, because we lack data regarding the total cost of OC, it is not possible to compare the harm caused by different types of OCs individually. This results in the irrational allocation of the state’s financial resources to departments dealing with different types of OCs, not on the basis of the harm caused by a certain OC, but on the basis of arbitrary criteria. Thus, more harmful types of OCs can end up with fewer resources. Places like the UK and the EU have addressed this issue in their respective strategies by adopting the ‘high value targets’ approach, ie, arriving at the total cost of all forms of OCs and allocating maximum resources to those which are the most harmful. This approach needs to be emulated in Pakistan.
The Anti-Money Laundering Authority (2023) should be immediately tasked with estimating the total cost of OC in Pakistan. The data may be used as a basis for formulating a new strategy against OC. Entities with experience in dealing with OC, including international agencies such as the FATF, IMF, and UNODC, and regional organisations like the EU, as well as countries such as the UK and Australia, can be asked to assist. The cost findings should be shared with the public in the interest of transparency and to secure political and public buy-in, thereby building pressure on the government to act.
Recently, the prime minister, during discussions with the IMF, reportedly said that a committee was being set up to investigate a multi-billion money-laundering scam through the over-invoicing of solar panels. That is a cosmetic response. The urgency and gravity of the increasing threat of OC in Pakistan demands that we go beyond setting up committees and take the bold decision to unmask the powerful but hidden beneficiaries by working out the total cost of OC.
The writer is a former director general of the Federal Investigation Agency, Pakistan.
Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2026