Trade and transit directly to China through the Wakhan Corridor is a long-held dream for Afghan governments, but the logistics remain a major hurdle.
Looking at Afghanistan’s map, one observes a narrow strip of land protruding northeastward out of its northern part. Called the Wakhan Corridor, it is a colonial construct to keep the borders of the Indian subcontinent, then under the British Empire, and the Russian Empire from intersecting. Today, the 350-kilometer long and 16-to-64-km wide Wakhan Corridor separates Pakistan and Tajikistan and ends at a short 92 km border with China’s expansive Xinjiang province.
This small strip of land is sparsely populated by around 10,000 people, but its strategic significance can be gauged from the fact that NATO built a military camp in the area during its presence in Afghanistan but never manned it to avoid geopolitical escalation with China. The Chinese also operated joint patrols with Afghan troops in the area in 2018 and initiated talks with Afghan officials for constructing a military base in the region. China is believed to be operating a secret military facility in the isolated Tajik town of Shaymak, 30 km from its border with Tajikistan and around 14 km from the Tajik-Afghan border to monitor activity in this crucial border region.
Besides its strategic significance, the Wakhan Corridor is now widely seen in Afghanistan as a possible direct trade conduit with China. Currently, there is no trade link on their small shared border; Afghanistan’s trade with China is instead routed through third countries, like Pakistan.
Considering its increasing mining interests in Afghanistan after its investment in the Mes Aynak copper mines 40 km southeast of Kabul, the Chinese started assisting Afghanistan in building a road in Wakhan in May 2021, at an estimated cost of around $5.07 million. The project began shortly before the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban in August 2021 and the fall of the Republic government. The Taliban’s interim government continued with the work on the road project after it assumed control.
It is unclear whether the Chinese government continued to fund the project or which stretch of the long road was built. However, in September 2023, the Taliban government’s ambassador to China held discussions with Chinese authorities regarding the commencement of traffic through the Wakhan Corridor. The Taliban’s Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi also raised the opening of a trade corridor through Wakhan with China in his meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the third Trans-Himalaya Forum for International Cooperation in October 2023.
In January, a Taliban government official from Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province as well as the governor of the province announced the completion of the construction of a road link up to the country’s border with China.
Despite the announcement of the completion of the project, a road link with China remains far from suitable for meaningful cross-border trade. It still takes four hours to cover the 150 km distance from Faizabad – the capital of Badakhshan province – to Eshkashem on Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan at the start of the Wakhan Corridor. It takes another four hours to cover the next 80 km to reach a town called Khandud on a dilapidated dirt track. After Khandud, there is hardly any road to speak of; just an off-road dirt track with several tricky water crossings that might lead a lucky off-roader to the Chinese border after a grueling eight to ten-hour journey through unadulterated wilderness. It’s hard to imagine trucks laden with goods making it through the region.
Therefore, while some analysts are of the view that China has opted not to open the route owing to lack of customs infrastructure on the border and security concerns from Afghanistan, the lack of a road – despite the Taliban’s claim to have completed one – remains the primary challenge. It is for this reason that most of the Chinese trade with Afghanistan — amounting to $1.33 billion in 2023 and highly in favor of China — is via the sea route primarily through Pakistan’s ports in Karachi.
In September 2022, China attempted to use a land route for its trade with Afghanistan by sending its first-ever cargo shipment from Kashgar to Afghanistan through the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan route, using a road link up to Osh in Kyrgyzstan and a rail link all the way to Hairatan in Afghanistan’s Balkh province. The cargo arrived in Afghanistan’s Hairatan town on the border with Uzbekistan nine days later.
To further shorten the time, in August 2023, China utilized its recently upgraded road corridor through Pakistan under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) for its export shipments to Afghanistan for the first time. It took the cargo six days to arrive in Kabul.
China even inaugurated a new TIR logistics hub in Kashgar in May to take care of all key transit services such as customs clearance, warehousing, cargo handling, route development, and transport-capacity matching, under one roof. The aim of the hub, which processed its first cargo to Afghanistan via Pakistan in August, is to facilitate on-land trade – primarily with Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan, but also with Afghanistan.
Considering the near-impossibility of trade between Afghanistan and China through the Wakhan Corridor and large-scale Chinese investment in Pakistan’s transport infrastructure under CPEC, Pakistan remains the best possible route for trade between western China and Afghanistan. However, given Pakistan’s ongoing tiff with the Taliban government in Afghanistan because of terrorism concerns, Pakistan’s two major border crossings with Afghanistan at Torkham and Chaman have been subject to frequent closures in the past year or so.
That situation needs to change. On the one hand, Pakistan’s precarious economic situation demands that it move away from its security-centric attitude toward a more geoeconomic approach. On the other hand, the evolving situation in the Middle East can seriously impact landlocked Afghanistan’s efforts at trade through Iranian ports, one of Afghanistan’s few alternatives to transit through Pakistan.
Since Pakistan is likely to remain important for Chinese trade connectivity with Afghanistan, Beijing can play a role in ensuring that security-related issues between Islamabad and Kabul are either resolved or at least prevented from spilling over into other dimensions of their relations, like trade and people-to-people relations. Such an approach will be in the best interest of all three countries.
Source: The Diplomat
