War profiteering and moral complicity

War profiteering and moral complicity are presented as more than the business of selling goods into a conflict: they concern the interests that grow around prolonged violence and the participation of people who recognize its human cost. In Karachi, foreign traders and local power brokers treat the war in Afghanistan as a market with years of potential profit ahead. Lin, working for Abdel Khader Khan, sees the resemblance between their calculations and his own. His discomfort makes the concept personal: he is not merely observing a corrupt economy, but helping it function.

The War as a Market

Karachi’s wartime economy depends on an alliance of state power and private opportunity. Pakistan’s generals have seized control, looted public funds, and opened the armed forces to international arms deals. Dealers from America, Britain, China, Sweden, Italy, and elsewhere arrive in the city, while black marketeers, gunrunners, mercenaries, and other foreign operators gather in its cafés and hotels. The result is a marketplace in which official procurement and illicit trade occupy neighboring spaces, both sustained by the prospect of continuing conflict.

The goods are described as cash crops, a euphemistic label for contraband and black-market supplies. Cigarettes, especially American brands, sell at the Khyber Pass for sixteen times their already inflated Karachi price. Medicines become more profitable month by month, and clothing suitable for winter conditions is in high demand. These details show how scarcity along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border converts ordinary necessities into lucrative commodities. The market does not need to produce the war; it can profit by moving goods through the conditions the war creates.

A German trader’s shipment makes the distance between commercial success and military purpose especially clear. He drives a truck carrying surplus German alpine uniforms and thermal underwear from Munich to Peshawar, then sells the cargo and the truck for five times their purchase value to an Afghan warlord favored by Western governments and agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency. The uniforms travel through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, yet never reach the mujaheddin fighting in Afghanistan. They remain stored in the warlord’s warehouse, intended for a later struggle for power after the fighting against the Russians ends. A long supply route and a large profit therefore conceal a basic failure of the stated wartime purpose: the clothing is acquired but withheld from the people for whom it would be useful.

Profit Depends on Continuation

The trader’s story spreads among foreign opportunists in Karachi, passing through several slightly different versions as they pursue deals in canned food, fleece, engine parts, spirit stoves, and weapons ranging from bayonets to grenade launchers. The warlord, with money from the Central Intelligence Agency and a willingness to pay, becomes the focus of speculative excitement. The story does not travel as a warning about diversion or a report about unmet need. It circulates as evidence that another market may be opening.

The traders calculate that the war could continue for several more years. Some hope that the military junta will retain power, along with the established channels of corruption, because political stability under military rule would keep business conditions familiar. In this setting, peace is not everyone’s preferred outcome: an extended war means more time to sell, transport, and profit from supplies. The civilians and combatants whose lives depend on the conflict’s course are largely absent from the traders’ calculations. Lin observes that those gathered in the cafés and hotels want the war to continue and show little concern about who is killed or who does the killing.

The system also exposes a gap between the stated beneficiaries of wartime supply and the people who control its distribution. The winter clothing reaches a warehouse in Peshawar rather than the fighting men in the mountains. Its eventual use is planned in relation to the warlord’s political ambition, not immediate need at the front. This diversion joins private profit to a contest for future power: the war creates the opportunity to accumulate resources, while the stored goods may help determine who governs after it ends.

Lin’s Participation and Unease

Lin’s position is complicated by the path that brought him into Abdel Khader Khan’s organization. Before accepting Khader as a teacher, Lin had committed serious crimes, but understood himself as a desperate man acting to support a heroin habit and, later, as an exile earning commissions on scattered deals. The distinction he draws between someone who commits crimes and a criminal rests on motive and means. After imprisonment in Arthur Road Prison, he wants to discover who sent him there and why, and he wants revenge. Joining Khader’s branch of the mafia appears to him the safest and fastest way to pursue it.

Khader gives Lin a route into organized crime and sends him to Khaled Ansari to learn black-market money trading. Lin becomes a paid participant in Khader’s work, and later serves as Khader’s American in the Afghanistan operation. He describes himself as bringing new supplies into the conflict, an act he sees as comparable to the traders’ work. His earlier motives do not erase the practical resemblance: he is making money from a war economy and helping move goods into a fight.

A conversation with Khaled at the Faloodah House brings that conflict into focus. Lin has spent the afternoon visiting restaurants, hotels, and tea shops where black-market traders and mercenaries meet. Their calculations trouble him because he is doing much the same work himself. Khaled suggests that Lin feels tainted by his proximity to them; Lin agrees that his own role makes their talk harder to dismiss. Khader is paying him, and Lin is supplying the conflict, even while he condemns people who hope it will last. When Khaled asks whether Lin is beginning to question what he is doing there, Lin admits that he does not know why he agreed beyond the fact that Khader asked him.

Khaled resists treating Lin’s work as precisely identical to that of the opportunists. The distinction remains unresolved in the conversation: Lin insists on the resemblance, while Khaled says it is not exactly the same. Their disagreement gives the idea of complicity a personal scale. Participation may differ in purpose or relationship, yet the money and supplies still connect Lin to a system whose commercial participants benefit from the war’s continuation. Lin’s uncertainty does not free him from the consequences of his role; it marks the moment when he can no longer treat that role as morally uncomplicated.

War, Motive, and Consequence

The book places profit among the motives that sustain war, but does not present it as the only motive. In a later reflection, Lin distinguishes the reasons people give for fighting from what keeps them fighting once violence has narrowed their world to survival. Profit and principle may help start wars, while protection of land and loved ones becomes decisive to those caught in them. The contrast does not excuse the traders. Instead, it sets their speculative distance against the intimate stakes that war imposes on the people who live and fight within it.

Khader’s account of the Second Anglo-Afghan War links the contemporary conflict to an older history of invasion, resistance, and struggle around Kandahar. He recalls British entry through the Khyber Pass in November 1878, Prince Ayub Khan’s campaign, and the Battle of Maiwand, after which the British retreated to Kandahar and the city was besieged. His family connection to Ayub’s army makes the history more than detached military background. Set beside the modern trade in supplies, it shows how commercial calculations enter a landscape already shaped by successive contests for control.

The later fighting also makes clear how quickly ideological or commercial explanations can be overtaken by survival. As Lin and the others move down a mountain slope, enemy mortars find their range and gunfire begins; the immediate problem is escape from a battle, not the prospect of future profit. The market in Karachi and the danger in Afghanistan are connected, but not equivalent. Traders can discuss how many years of war remain as a business opportunity; those under fire confront the consequences in real time.

The concept’s central tension is therefore not simply that people profit from war, but that they can recognize the harm and continue to participate. Lin’s own account makes motive relevant without making it absolution: revenge brought him to Khader, and Khader’s request kept him in the work, but neither fact settles what his supplies mean to the conflict. Karachi’s traders turn war into a forecast of sales; Lin’s unease arises when he sees that he is also inside the forecast, benefiting from the same prolonged violence he finds morally sickening.