Gwadar reroutes Tajikistan’s Afghan dependency. Chabahar ends it
The Iran-Tajikistan corridor through Chabahar does not pass through Afghanistan. Photograph: (AFP)
The Iran-Tajikistan corridor through Chabahar does not pass through Afghanistan. It leverages Iranian territory and Turkmen and Uzbek networks under treaty-backed protocols, connecting to infrastructure developed for Iran’s Central Asian strategy.
The proposal to establish Gwadar Port as Tajikistan’s primary transit hub identifies road connectivity as central to making the corridor work. What the proposal does not foreground is that the only viable overland route from Gwadar to Tajikistan passes through Afghanistan.
For a landlocked country that currently relies on Afghanistan for transit and pays an economic premium for the associated risk and delay, the question Tajikistan’s trade planners are likely asking is straightforward: how does routing through Gwadar change the Afghan dependency?
Torkham and Chaman are the bottlenecks
Any cargo moving from Gwadar’s coast toward Tajikistan must pass through either Torkham, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, or Chaman, in Balochistan. Both crossings are documented bottlenecks. Truck queues at both terminals run to days during peak periods. Border infrastructure is chronically underfunded for current trade volumes it is asked to handle, customs procedures are slow, and coordination between Pakistani and Afghan border management is inconsistent. Pakistan’s proposal treats road connectivity to Tajikistan as a discussion point. The discussion should begin with these two crossings and the documented record of their performance.
Taliban governance is not a stable transit guarantee
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Afghanistan under Taliban governance since August 2021 has not provided the predictable, rule-based transit environment that scheduled commercial freight requires. Border closures, arbitrary duties, and political disputes between Kabul and Islamabad have periodically disrupted trade. The Torkham crossing was shut for days in 2023 following a dispute between Pakistani and Afghan border authorities, directly affecting cargo in transit. Any transit framework Pakistan builds for Tajikistan through this corridor is contingent on a political relationship with Kabul that has been volatile and a security environment that has been unpredictable. These are not abstract risks. They are documented events.
Weak infrastructure inside Afghanistan
Beyond the border terminals, the road infrastructure inside Afghanistan on the Gwadar-to-Tajikistan overland route is inadequate for the kind of high-volume, multi-commodity commercial transit Tajikistan requires. Road quality, bridge capacity, and fuel availability along the corridor are all constraints that add time, cost, and risk to each shipment. International freight insurers already price these conditions into their Afghan corridor premiums, and those premiums compound the insurance surcharges that Gwadar itself attracts because of active Baloch insurgency.
Chabahar bypasses Afghanistan
The Iran-Tajikistan corridor through Chabahar does not pass through Afghanistan. It leverages Iranian territory and Turkmen and Uzbek networks under treaty-backed protocols, connecting to infrastructure developed for Iran’s Central Asian strategy. Iran and Tajikistan have now signed formal agreements to operationalise Chabahar as a transit corridor, including a railway transit MoU that enables Iranian freight wagons to operate on Tajikistan’s network.
For Tajikistan, this is the material difference between the two proposals. Gwadar asks Tajikistan to continue depending on Afghan transit but via a different port. Chabahar removes that dependency. That distinction is no longer just an argument being made in deliberations. It is now the basis of a signed framework.
