Deep Sea Quiet Zones: Why Pakistan Must Close The Mid-Ocean Handover Gap – OpEd
Pakistan sits at the start of the sea leg that carries heroin and methamphetamine out of the Makran coast. That position brings responsibility. Yet the decisive stage of the pipeline is not on the beach or at a jetty. It lies far offshore in quiet patches of the Arabian Sea between Makran and the Gulf of Aden, where small dhows meet larger “mother” vessels, move cargo at sea, and disappear into ordinary traffic before board authority is clear. If Pakistan wants results rather than headlines, policy and practice must target this mid-ocean theatre directly.
The route is well known. A branch of the Southern Route moves heroin and now meth from the Makran shoreline by dhow into the wider Indian Ocean, with relays towards Oman, India and East Africa. United Nations material has long noted ship-to-ship transfers far from land. In recent years, Combined Maritime Forces working alongside the Pakistan Navy have announced large seizures from stateless dhows in the Arabian Sea, while Indian agencies have reported comparable interdictions off Gujarat. The pattern is consistent: small wooden hulls with sparse paperwork, satellite phones and fuel drums on deck, and payloads that are substantial for the size of the craft. The common factor is that many of these journeys manage their riskiest moves away from shore, in the very space where oversight thins.
Pakistan’s current approach still leans on coastal optics–dockside photographs, tonnage totals and press briefings. Those matter, but they do not break the logistics that keep the pipeline alive. Three realities at sea keep favouring traffickers and must be addressed in Pakistan’s own plan.
The first is visibility. Dhows are not obliged to carry AIS, and larger support vessels can simply switch it off. That creates long silent tracks across the Arabian Sea. Pakistan should treat AIS silence as a specific risk flag, not a blind spot. Navy and Pakistan Maritime Security Agency patrols can be tasked using fused feeds that track “going dark” episodes, recent interdiction locations and seasonal weather windows. Patrol boxes should move with the data, not with routine schedules.
The second is authority. Far offshore, lawful boarding depends on flag-state consent and task-force rules. A dhow can pass cargo to a mother ship with a different flag and buy time while permissions are sought. Pakistan must reduce that delay. Bilateral and multilateral consent frameworks should be expanded and pre-cleared for this corridor, so that mismatched flags do not automatically stall interdictions. Joint playbooks shared by the Navy, PMSA, the Anti-Narcotics Force and prosecutors should set out, in plain steps, who acts, under which legal hook, and how evidence is secured when a suspected handover is detected.
The third is habit. Traffickers plan around monsoons, fuel prices and patrol cycles. When the sea settles and routine patrols thin, rendezvous are easier to stage in the same boxes on the chart. Pakistan should use its own fisheries knowledge to anticipate these windows. The same seamanship that guides local fleets can guide patrols. If certain grounds and weather breaks repeatedly align with interdictions, they deserve priority coverage.
None of this will matter without strong evidence handling. Pakistan’s courts are strict on chain of custody and laboratory procedure, and they should be. That makes disciplined practice at sea decisive. Boarding teams must seal, log, sample and transfer exhibits to standards that survive in court, not only to standards that look convincing in photographs. Commanders should measure success not by kilograms and “street value”, but by how many mid-ocean cases convert into indictments and convictions against organisers, not only crew.
The handover theatre also demands land follow-through. Destroying or seizing drugs at sea does not dismantle a network. Every interdiction should trigger automatic financial and communications work ashore: call-detail records from seized phones and sat units, checks on fuel and provisioning, histories of engines and hull repairs from Jiwani to Pasni and Turbat, and links to trucking and brokerage services inland. Without that, the system replaces crews and boats while the organisers carry on.
Pakistan can also close the information gap that traffickers exploit. Shared registries across the Navy, PMSA, ANF and provincial police should record vessel identifiers where available, engine swaps, satellite phone IMEIs and repeat crew names. Over months and years, these threads connect apparently separate seizures into cases that point at organisers. Regional sharing with Oman, India, Iran and East African partners should be routine rather than ad hoc. Networks already stitch these seams together. Agencies must do the same.
Community intelligence is another untapped asset. Fishing cooperatives and coastal communities see movement patterns that do not appear on screens. Structured liaison can help distinguish normal seasonal work from staging for mid-sea transfers, without criminalising legitimate livelihoods. Well-designed reporting channels and small, reliable incentives can surface leads that a patrol plane will miss.
Finally, incentives must shift. Agencies are praised for tonnage and deck-side photos. Prosecutors are blamed when cases collapse. Pakistan should reward units that deliver clean evidence chains and successful prosecutions, and it should publish outcome metrics by default: indictments filed, convictions secured, and assets seized within six to twelve months of a mid-ocean interdiction. If a “record haul” produces no upstream case within that window, the country should treat it as a warning that procedure and follow-through failed.
Targeting Pakistan’s offshore gap does not mean ignoring corruption or industrial cover on land. It means recognising that a governance void at sea has been engineered into the supply chain and closing it with practical tools. Smarter patrol tasking, faster boarding authority, disciplined evidence practice and automatic land-side investigations will make the mid-ocean theatre the most dangerous place in the journey rather than the safest. Until that happens, dhows will remain the workhorses of the Makran route, and quiet handovers between Makran and the Gulf of Aden will keep a much larger machine moving.
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India instead should cease to export terror into the region and stop to support terrorist organization. When it comes to crimes no one is second to Indians. Drugs trafficking comes from Afghanistan with Indian support, another black feather in the cap of terror supporting extremist nation of Bharat!