Since the Istanbul talks collapsed in early November 2025, the Afghanistan–Pakistan confrontation has been measured mostly in air strikes and casualty figures, charted in our earlier coverage of the conflict. By July 2026, Afghanistan had launched its first confirmed air and drone strikes on Pakistani soil in the current round of conflict in response to a large aerial assault launched by Pakistan earlier in the month. But the military campaign is only one front of Pakistan's pressure on Kabul. Alongside the air campaign, Pakistan has deployed three instruments that draw less attention: trade, deportation, and border management. Each mechanism exerts pressure onto Kabul, while Afghanistan has limited symmetric leverage. This article examines that quieter war, and why its cumulative weight may matter as much to the Taliban's hold on power as the strikes themselves.
Economic War: From Interdependence to Isolation
In November 2025, The Durand Dispatch identified border closures and trade suspensions as parallel instruments of Pakistani coercion. And its December analysis traced the beginning of Afghanistan's economic reorientation in response. What this year has produced is qualitatively different: not a managed reduction in trade, but a structural rupture whose consequences are now compounded by the Iran war's disruption of Afghanistan's western corridor.
The scale of the trade collapse is now documented with some precision. Bilateral trade fell from $2.46 billion in 2024 to $1.77 billion in 2025, a $695 million decline, and Pakistan's exports to Afghanistan fell a further 56 percent in the first half of fiscal year 2026, to $219.489 million. Pakistani exporters are losing an estimated $177 million per month from the prolonged closures, with Pakistan's overall trade deficit with neighboring countries surging 44 percent to $7.683 billion in the first half of fiscal year 2026. The domestic costs in Pakistan were substantial. Provincial officials in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa wrote to the Commerce Ministry warning of losses in revenue, jobs, and cross-border employment.
Drivers staged protests, most recently a sit-in at Torkham in May 2026 demanding the return of Pakistani drivers stranded in Afghanistan. The Pakistan-Afghanistan Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry lobbied both governments for reopening — its secretary-general noting the closures had halted not just bilateral trade but goods from China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Central Asia transiting through the corridor. Opposition figures including Maulana Fazlur Rehman and the Tehreek Tahaffuz-e-Ain Pakistan coalition, a broad multi-party opposition alliance including JUI-F and PTI, publicly called for reopening the border. Traders on both sides made their own case: Chaman traders traveled to Islamabad to lobby the Commerce Ministry directly, while Afghan truck driver Anwar Zadran, stranded for months near Torkham with a truck full of cement he could not deliver, said: "The people are destroyed and the goods are damaged as well. I wish the border would open soon so that we can get some relief." None of this moved the federal government. An estimated 12,000 cargo containers of Afghan transit goods were stranded, the last reported figure, from January 2026, and goods backed up at Jebel Ali and Bandar Abbas could not be rerouted without costs that made the economics unworkable for most traders. One Kabul businessman told the Associated Press: "We can neither export nor import." In November, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry formally linked trade to security, with the spokesperson stating the border would remain closed until security concerns were addressed. As we documented in November, this reversed a prior policy of deliberately keeping trade and security concerns on separate tracks — an approach Pakistan had maintained even during earlier periods of heightened tension.
The structural asymmetry of the two economies makes the closure more damaging for Afghanistan than for Pakistan in ways that merit emphasis. Afghanistan depends on Pakistan for approximately over 40 percent of its exports and 14 percent of its direct imports; Pakistan's macroeconomic exposure to the loss of Afghan trade, by contrast, amounts to roughly 0.5 percent of annual exports. More significantly, Afghanistan's trade vulnerability was exposed from two directions simultaneously. Pakistan was Afghanistan's single largest export market, though India was overtaking it by 2025. Iran was the largest single import source, accounting for 30 percent of total imports, primarily fuel and essential goods. The closure of both corridors simultaneously, Pakistan from October 2025, Iran following Operation Epic Fury in late February, struck the Taliban's revenue base and supply chains from two directions at once. Customs duties constitute over half of the Taliban's domestic revenue, roughly 53 percent in fiscal year 2024 according to World Bank data, collected primarily at the border crossings through which imports enter. When Pakistan closes its border crossings with Afghanistan, the customs posts at those crossings collect nothing: not on bilateral trade, and not on third-country goods transiting through Pakistan. The Iran closure cut a second corridor through which dutiable imports would otherwise flow. The dual closure is therefore not just a commercial disruption but a direct fiscal one, a sustained haemorrhage of the revenue the Taliban depends on to govern.
That haemorrhage has been compounded by a development that the Iran war made possible and the conflict with Afghanistan made attractive. In April 2026, Pakistan formalized six overland transit routes to Iran, ostensibly driven by the Hormuz disruption that had stranded thousands of containers at Karachi port. But the move also allowed Pakistan to bypass Afghan territory for westbound trade entirely, reducing its own dependence on a corridor it had already closed. A route that Kabul might have used as residual leverage has been rendered redundant. The asymmetry between the two economies, already stark, has widened further.
The Taliban attempted to manage this through structural reorientation, a deliberate shift away from economic dependence on Pakistan that the border closures had made both necessary and politically convenient. In November, Deputy Prime Minister Baradar ordered traders to reduce reliance on Pakistani goods and seek alternatives through Central Asia, accusing Islamabad of using trade as a "tool of political pressure." The figures suggest some traction: Afghan bilateral trade with Iran reached $1.6 billion in the latter half of 2025, while trade with Central Asian states grew substantially: imports rising from $1.7 billion to $2.4 billion and exports from $94 million to $216 million across the year. The fracture extended to the financial sector: Bank Alfalah, one of the largest Pakistani commercial presences in Afghan banking, moved to exit the market, citing persistent political, economic, and regulatory challenges; after operating in Afghanistan since 2005, a departure the Pakistan-Afghanistan Joint Chamber of Commerce read as a signal that Pakistan's private sector had lost confidence in the relationship's near-term recovery. By February, the Taliban had formalized the break further, halting medicine imports from Pakistan and expanding cargo and passenger flights to Delhi via Ariana Afghan Airlines — routing goods and passengers through India rather than via Pakistani transit routes.
Of Afghanistan's major trade partners, only Pakistan controls a corridor that is both large enough to matter and capable of being reopened through a political decision. That places extraordinary leverage in Islamabad's hands, leverage that has to date failed to produce the written TTP commitments Pakistan demands but which continues to compound the humanitarian pressure on the Taliban government with each passing month. The World Food Program has warned that millions of Afghan children's lives are "hanging in the balance" as transport costs surge and stocks of nutritional supplements run out, a humanitarian cost that Pakistan's coercion strategy has so far treated as acceptable collateral.
The Refugee Weapon
No instrument is more revealing than the deportation campaign. It directly translates Pakistani state decisions into Afghan governance failure, without requiring Islamabad to expose its forces or accept international accountability for the consequences.
The campaign's legal architecture was established by Pakistan's "Illegal Foreigners' Repatriation Plan," launched in October 2023. The Durand Dispatch's November 2025 analysis noted how the plan evolved from an ad hoc enforcement measure into a deliberate instrument of coercive pressure on the Taliban government. Its scale in the period under review represents a qualitative escalation. Pakistan deported more than one million Afghans by force in 2025, and a further 146,000 in the first months of 2026 alone. UNHCR data places the total at 232,500 Afghan returnees so far in 2026, 146,206 from Pakistan and 86,253 from Iran. Since October 2023, more than 5.4 million Afghans have returned from Iran and Pakistan combined, many not by choice. Daily expulsions were measured in the thousands: on December 29, the Taliban High Commission for Migrant Affairs reported that 2,628 Afghans had been deported in a single day; by May 1, the figure had risen to 5,178 Afghan nationals deported in 24 hours. UNHCR documented that Pakistani police ramped up detentions tenfold in the first ten months of 2025, to 100,971.
One pattern, identified previously, has continued through the period under review: Pakistan has consistently reopened border crossings exclusively for the deportation of Afghan refugees while keeping them closed to commercial trade. On March 31, 2026, Torkham was reopened solely for Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan - trade, commercial traffic, and general passenger travel remained suspended. The crossing had briefly opened the previous week for deportee returns before being closed again, then reopened once more for the same purpose. The deliberate asymmetry, deportees permitted through yet commerce blocked, is the clearest operational evidence that the two instruments are being deployed separately and intentionally: one to relieve Pakistan of a domestic political burden, the other to maintain economic pressure on Kabul.
For the Taliban government on the receiving end, the consequences are severe, and for Pakistan, that severity is the instrument. Those returned arrive into a country already facing an acute humanitarian crisis: nearly 22 million Afghans, close to half the population, require humanitarian assistance in 2026. The influx has placed severe strain on host communities: rents have doubled in parts of Kabul and other cities as demand outstripped supply, with landlords evicting long-term tenants for higher-paying newcomers and returnees cycling through unaffordable accommodation. The Taliban's Ministry of Justice imposed a 10 percent cap on rent increases and threatened legal action against landlords who exceeded it; by April 2026, the measures had had no practical effect, with landlords reportedly raising rents secretly and some Taliban officials themselves benefiting from property taxes on the inflated market. Returnees face makeshift shelters with no safe water and virtually no sanitation; Medecines Sans Frontiers (MSF) documented conditions east of Kandahar in late 2025 of severe overcrowding, absent medical services, and acute psychological distress. The military campaign compounds this picture: Nangarhar, the single largest destination province for returnees from Pakistan at 26 percent of all arrivals, and home to the Torkham crossing through which the majority enter, has simultaneously been among the most frequently targeted provinces throughout Operation Ghazab lil Haq, struck both in the initial February 22 offensive and in subsequent rounds through March and beyond. The convergence is not coincidental: it is the structural consequence of Pakistan applying maximum pressure across all available instruments simultaneously.
Deportation is distinct from Pakistan's other coercive tools in one respect: its asymmetry. Afghanistan has no comparable lever. Pakistan deports; Afghanistan absorbs. The receiving capacity of the Taliban government, already strained by conflict, food insecurity, and the loss of trade revenues, is being systematically degraded by mass return without any reciprocal pressure flowing in the opposite direction. But the asymmetry of flows means that every month the campaign continues, the balance of pressure tilts further against Kabul.
The Durand Line Returns as an Active Demand
Among the most significant developments was the resurfacing of the Durand Line as an explicit demand. The issue had already surfaced implicitly at the Doha ceasefire in October 2025: Qatar's official post-agreement statement included language about "respect for each other's territorial integrity," which was immediately read as implying Durand Line recognition. Taliban Defense Minister Yaqoob Mujahid held a press conference the same day to clarify that the Durand Line was not discussed and described it as an "imaginary border"; Qatar subsequently removed the "border" reference from its statement. The episode was a signal of how sensitive the issue remained, even mediated language that touched on it indirectly produced an immediate public rebuttal. What changed in the months that followed was the degree of explicitness: in early March, Taliban Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid revealed that Pakistani delegations had formally asked the Taliban to recognize the Durand Line as the official border during the Istanbul and Doha talks, a substantive escalation from Pakistan's earlier focus on TTP sanctuaries alone. What has changed is not Pakistan's position. Recognition of the Durand Line is a demand the Taliban have consistently rejected, with Deputy Foreign Minister Stanikzai stating that "we have never recognized Durand and will never recognize it.” The issue is a recurring source of cross-border firings and outpost construction disputes that this publication has monitored consistently, but the willingness to table it explicitly within a mediated diplomatic process, where it has previously remained a background condition rather than a stated demand, is a significant development. By tabling it explicitly, Pakistan added a demand no Taliban leadership could survive delivering, narrowing the space for settlement still further.
The Taliban declined Pakistan's request, and the issue subsequently generated a notable public debate among Afghan political figures. Former senior official Mohammad Mohaqiq stated that he recognized the Durand Line as defined by the United Nations, drawing strong rebukes from former Foreign Minister Atmar (who called it "an imposed imaginary line"). The episode revealed both the diversity of Afghan elite opinion on the question and the political difficulty any Taliban leadership would face in delivering Durand Line recognition as a concession. The Taliban's own position has been restated consistently throughout the period: in January 2026, Deputy Foreign Minister Stanikzai declared that Afghanistan would "never" recognize the Durand Line, prompting Pakistan to dismiss the statement as "self-serving and fanciful claims."
Trade, deportations, and the Durand Line have each been examined here as discrete instruments of coercion. Together they amount to something more than the sum of their parts: a sustained assault on the Taliban's capacity to govern. Pakistan's aim is clear enough — to compound the costs of the Taliban's strategic position until Kabul calculates that compliance is cheaper than resistance. That calculation may never come. Pakistani pressure has already fueled anti-Pakistan sentiment across the Afghan population, handing the Taliban a nationalist narrative it can exploit, consolidating rather than fracturing its domestic position. Yet, as we documented in ‘Why Neither Side Can Deliver’, the Taliban's governing coalition is itself divided, and the combination of fiscal strangulation, mass return, and an active military campaign is without precedent for a Taliban government. Whether those internal fault lines hold under that pressure is the question this conflict has not yet answered.
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