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Five years after the Taliban returned to Kabul, Afghanistan’s economic relationship with Pakistan is undergoing a structural shift. For Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, particularly Peshawar, this is not simply a bilateral trade issue. It is increasingly a question of industrial resilience and competitiveness.
The clearest evidence is Afghanistan’s transit trade through Pakistan. Container traffic, which had risen to nearly 89,000 containers worth about $5 billion before the Taliban returned to power, briefly climbed to a record 102,886 containers valued at $6.7bn in FY23.
It then went into reverse. Volumes fell to 54,114 containers in FY24 and 42,959 in FY25, worth $1.36bn. In FY26, they collapsed to just 11,592 containers valued at $367 million, according to customs data cited in a recent Dawn report.
The numbers matter because they show that Pakistan’s October 2025 border restrictions did not create the decline; they accelerated a process that was already under way.
