Pakistan is more than a route between Bombay and Afghanistan: it is a place where military rule, ethnic conflict, arms dealing, and illicit trade meet. Lin crosses it while carrying out Abdel Khader Khan’s mission to supply Afghan resistance fighters, but the country’s politics make that journey dangerous and its markets reveal how drugs, weapons, and political influence sustain one another.

Transit Route and Concealed Mission

Abdel Khader Khan plans a complex itinerary from Bombay to Quetta, near the Afghan border, involving four major changes of transport. The travelers are instructed to behave as unrelated individuals and never acknowledge one another. The precautions are meant to prevent any capture from exposing the operation’s connections back to Bombay. Lin travels with several passports and a contingency fund, part of the equipment that allows him to move under different identities; in Karachi, his papers include a British passport used for travel and hotel registration, a clean American passport intended for Afghanistan, and Swiss and Canadian spares.

Karachi is the first significant stop on the journey. Lin and his companions travel there separately, and after reaching the city they check into separate rooms at the Chandni Hotel. The arrangement reflects the mission’s dependence on concealment, but it cannot guarantee safety: a tip reaches the police, and Nazeer manages to retrieve Lin’s carry bag shortly before officers arrive. The incident leaves the group asking who inside Abdel Khader Khan’s organization exposed them. The suspicion is consequential because Pakistan is not uniformly assisting the Afghan fighters they intend to reach.

The onward route also makes clear how different the covert journey is from ordinary travel. From Chaman, the highway journey to Kandahar is less than two hundred kilometres and takes only hours by car. Lin’s party avoids that route. They travel on horseback over more than a hundred mountain passes, taking over a month. Their baggage and supplies are disguised beneath animal skins in a pasture, with actual goats among the bundles to make the cargo resemble livestock from the air. Pakistan thus forms the staging ground for a mission whose practical demands are determined by secrecy as much as by distance.

Military Rule and Manufactured Conflict

The novel presents Pakistan under a military junta that seized power and executed the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Rather than resolve divisions, the generals exploit grievances among ethnic and religious communities. Sindis, Pashtuns, and Punjabis are set against Mohajir immigrants who arrived after the Partition of India. The army covertly supports rival extremists with resources and influence, then uses force to contain the conflicts it has helped provoke.

This system turns disorder into a source of authority. When violence erupts, police open fire; army troops then appear as the force capable of restoring order. As cycles of conflict and reprisal continue, the generals weaken groups that might challenge them and strengthen the army’s position. The country’s apparent instability is therefore also a method of rule: the military helps shape the crisis and presents itself as the necessary answer to it.

That political arrangement makes Karachi a paradoxical commercial center. The junta has taken control by force and looted public resources, yet it invites foreign arms manufacturers and dealers to do business with the armed forces. American, British, Chinese, Swedish, and Italian arms dealers arrive alongside black marketeers, gunrunners, mercenaries, and other illicit traders. Lin recognizes that his own work places him among people profiting from the Afghan war, even as their calculations about how long the conflict might continue make him uncomfortable. Pakistan’s military economy links formal international arms commerce with the informal networks that operate around it.

Drugs, Weapons, and Political Influence

Pakistan also lies along a major route for heroin moving from Afghanistan into India. Didier explains that Rafiq once led a passport black market, where men were killed in the struggle over the business. After losing that trade, Rafiq turned to brown sugar heroin, which is transported through Pakistan, and became a substantial supplier in Bombay. His change of business reflects the larger value of the drug trade, not a disappearance of the passport network’s earlier violence.

Rafiq also proposes closing opium dens. Didier explains that the move benefits Rafiq because brown sugar brings in more money than opium. Poor opium smokers consequently become heroin smokers, expanding the market Rafiq controls, though no single trader controls the thousands of kilos entering India. Pakistan’s position between Afghanistan and India makes it part of the route through which that shift in demand becomes a profitable business.

The same networks carry weapons and explosives. Didier describes arms reaching Sikh fighters in Punjab and Muslim separatists in Kashmir, and connects control of the drug trade with influence over the weapons trade. That leverage matters to the Sena Party, which is concerned with the flow of guns into Maharashtra. The account places political power, commercial profit, and armed conflict in the same system: control of one illicit trade can provide influence over another, while parties and state actors seek to shape who can obtain weapons.

The Afghan War and Pakistan’s Divided Support

The police interest in Abdel Khader Khan’s group initially seems contradictory to Lin, because Pakistan is supporting Afghanistan in its war against the Soviet Union. Khaled clarifies the distinction: Pakistan supports some Afghan factions, but the fighters near Kandahar whom the group intends to supply are associated with Ahmed Shah Massoud. They reject Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other leaders favored by Pakistan and the United States. The conflict is therefore not simply a contest between Pakistan and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union on the other; Afghan resistance groups also disagree over who should lead after the war.

The account further connects the war to decisions made beyond Pakistan. Some Afghans believe the United States withholds Stinger missiles during the conflict’s first seven years to let the Soviet Union become overextended before supplying a weapon that could alter the balance. Whether that belief is correct or not, the missiles eventually arrive a few months after Abdel Khader Khan leads the group into Afghanistan, and the narrative links their introduction to a decisive change in the war. It also stresses the cost: mass displacement, refugee flight through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar and into other countries, and widespread lasting harm to Afghan communities. Pakistan is consequently both a corridor for resistance and refuge and a participant in the regional calculations surrounding the conflict.

Return Route and Narrative Significance

After two months repairing and modifying weapons and using up most of their supplies, Abdel Khader Khan plans the group’s return. The route will detour west toward Kandahar to deliver horses to his family, then continue by night toward the safety of the Pakistani border. The plan shows how the same geography that enabled the covert entry also governs withdrawal: reaching the border requires another hazardous passage, not a simple reversal of the original journey.

Pakistan’s significance lies in this double role. It is the route through which Lin and his companions travel, a market for arms dealers and illicit operators, and a state whose support for Afghan resistance is selective and politically calculated. These intersecting functions prevent the country from serving as a neutral backdrop. Its borders and policies shape who can be supplied, which networks prosper, and how far the consequences of the Afghan war extend.