Closed Gates, Idle Trucks: Afghan Transit Trade Keeps Breaking Down

The Afghan Transit Trade Agreement was supposed to settle, decades ago, how goods move between Pakistan’s ports and landlocked Afghanistan. In practice, the arrangement gets renegotiated in the streets every few months, whenever security incidents or diplomatic friction prompt one side to shut a crossing. The latest closures at Torkham and Chaman have again stranded thousands of loaded trucks and reignited an argument that never really gets resolved: whether transit trade is a shared economic lifeline or a security liability each government tolerates only when convenient.

A Familiar Pattern

The proximate triggers vary — a border skirmish, a dispute over documentation requirements, a demand from Kabul for looser restrictions on what can transit, a demand from Islamabad for tighter security screening — but the pattern repeats: a crossing closes, trade volumes collapse for days or weeks, perishable goods rot in queues, and informal cross-border routes absorb some of the diverted traffic at a markup. Formal trade resumes eventually, usually after a negotiated understanding that addresses the immediate trigger without touching the underlying structural friction.

That friction runs both ways. Islamabad has long complained that transit goods bound for Afghanistan are smuggled back into Pakistan, undercutting domestic industry and costing tariff revenue — a complaint that predates the current government by years and has never been fully resolved despite repeated tracking and bonding schemes. Kabul, in turn, argues that Pakistan uses border closures as a blunt instrument of political pressure, holding an landlocked economy’s trade routes hostage to unrelated security disputes.

Why This Keeps Recurring

The deeper problem is that Afghan transit trade sits at the intersection of three separate relationships that rarely move in sync: the security relationship, which is dominated by cross-border militancy concerns; the economic relationship, where Pakistani ports are the cheapest route to the sea for Afghan trade but not the only one now that Iran’s Chabahar port offers an alternative; and the diplomatic relationship, which swings with whichever government is in Kabul and how it is perceived in Islamabad. A closure justified on security grounds lands on an economic relationship that has no independent channel to object, and a diplomatic dispute often gets litigated through the border rather than through direct government channels.

The emergence of Chabahar as a viable alternative route changes the incentive structure in a way that should worry Pakistani trade planners more than it currently does. Every prolonged closure gives Afghan traders — and Indian planners looking to route goods around Pakistan entirely — more reason to invest in the Iranian alternative, eroding the leverage that Pakistan’s transit monopoly used to provide.

What Durable Fixes Would Look Like

A more stable arrangement would need three things Pakistan and Afghanistan have discussed for years without fully implementing: a tracking system for transit cargo robust enough that Islamabad no longer treats every closure as a smuggling crackdown, a standing bilateral mechanism to de-link routine trade from security disputes so that closures require a higher threshold than they currently do, and joint investment in the crossings’ physical capacity, which remains a bottleneck even when both sides want trade moving.

None of this is close to being built. Until it is, Afghan transit trade will keep functioning the way it has for years — as a relationship of convenience, renegotiated at the border every time the wider relationship sours.