ON 4 October, the Taliban Administration inaugurated a 121-kilometre road through the Wakhan Corridor, running from Broghil, opposite Pakistan’s Chitral district, to the zero point on the Chinese border. The unpaved road cost barely five and a half million dollars and climbs toward the Wakhjir Pass at nearly 4,900 metres, snowbound for much of the year. Measured in tonnage, it rivals nothing on the Karakoram Highway. In strategic terms, it is the most significant change to Pakistan’s northern geography in decades, because for the first time Afghanistan and China have a direct land link that does not pass through Pakistan.
The Wakhan was drawn as a buffer. The Anglo-Russian settlement of 1895 left this thin strip in Afghan hands so that two empires would never touch. Pakistan’s regional leverage has rested on the opposite proposition: that it is the bridge. Landlocked Afghanistan depends on Karachi and the Torkham and Chaman crossings for its seaborne trade, while China’s westward ambition, embodied in CPEC, runs through Gilgit-Baltistan to Gwadar. Both relationships rest on Pakistan being the indispensable route. The Wakhan Road dents that monopoly.
The first vulnerability is leverage over Kabul. Islamabad has repeatedly closed border crossings during security crises with the Taliban, using trade as an instrument of pressure. Every closure has strengthened Kabul’s case for alternatives through Iran, Central Asia and now China. A Taliban government less dependent on Pakistani ports is less responsive to Pakistani demands on the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, at the very moment those demands are most urgent, as this week’s deadlock at the Moscow Format talks showed.
The second concerns CPEC itself. In 2025, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to extend CPEC into Afghanistan and CPEC 2.0 assumes Pakistan is the gateway for that extension and for onward links to Central Asia. If Chinese goods can reach Afghanistan directly, the Afghan branch loses its natural logic and the Uzbekistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan railway loses part of its rationale. Beijing has so far treated the Wakhan chiefly as a security problem, wary of militant movement into Xinjiang and remains committed to CPEC. But options shape negotiations. A China with an alternative, however modest, has more room to press Pakistan over the security of its nationals and the slow pace of Gwadar and ML-1.
The third vulnerability is territorial. The road runs along Pakistan’s northern frontier, within reach of the passes into Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan. A lightly governed, newly mobile high-altitude corridor offers routes for militants, narcotics and weapons into areas where the TTP attacked Chitral as recently as 2023. It also borders Gilgit-Baltistan, the hinge of CPEC and Pakistan’s position on Kashmir. In the north, economic security and territorial defence are now a single problem. India’s opportunity is real but largely political, not physical. New Delhi has no land access to the corridor. What it has is a claim: India’s official maps depict Gilgit-Baltistan as part of Jammu and Kashmir and assert a 106-kilometre border with Afghanistan along the Wakhan. A functioning Wakhan route gives that claim new diplomatic currency. India has also steadily upgraded its ties with the Taliban and can be expected to promote the narrative that CPEC has been made redundant, discouraging investors while encouraging Kabul to route trade away from Pakistan. The danger lies less in Indian trucks than in Indian arguments.
There is an authentic precedent. For decades, Ukraine was the principal transit route for Russian gas to Europe and drew both revenue and leverage from that position. After disputes led to supply cutoffs in 2006 and 2009, Moscow built Nord Stream under the Baltic, opened in 2011, and later TurkStream, both designed to bypass Ukraine. Ukraine’s transit volumes and influence declined and transit ended altogether in January 2025. The lesson is precise: bypasses are built when the transit state becomes unpredictable and every disruption becomes the bypass’s business case. The difference is scale, for the Wakhan cannot replace CPEC. But it need not replace it in order to erode Pakistan’s bargaining position.
Pakistan’s response should be integration, not opposition. First, it should propose a quadrilateral transit and security protocol with China, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, giving Beijing the monitored, jointly patrolled frontier it wants and giving Islamabad a seat at the table. Second, it should build a link from Chitral across Broghil into the Wakhan, so that the new road feeds the Karakoram Highway and Gwadar instead of bypassing them. Third, it should separate trade from security disputes with Kabul, honouring the Afghanistan–Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement so crossings stop being bargaining chips. Fourth, it should accelerate CPEC 2.0’s tangible deliverables, the Karakoram Highway realignment, ML-1 and a functioning Gwadar, because the strongest answer to an alternative route is a better one. Fifth, it should strengthen surveillance along the Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan passes, deepen counter-terrorism coordination with China and pursue a legal strategy that strengthens Gilgit-Baltistan’s legal and administrative framework, aligns with Pakistan’s Kashmir position and responds to India’s claims in international forums.
The Wakhan road tests whether Pakistan understands its geography as a privilege or as a responsibility. Transit states keep their value only as long as they remain the most reliable route. Pakistan still holds the stronger hand: deep-water ports, an established highway network and Beijing’s trust. It must play that hand consistently, so the region’s newest road ultimately leads to Gwadar.
—The writer is a former Deputy Director General of International Law, Pakistan Armed Forces.
