On November 25, the Afghan authorities accused Pakistan of a new round of airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan. The bombing killed nine children and a woman, injuring several others.
The attacks are the latest escalation in rapidly worsening tensions between Islamabad and the Taliban-led government in Kabul, with key border crossings currently closed, and Afghan refugees being expelled from Pakistan.
At the heart of the crisis is Pakistan’s claim that Kabul is providing support to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistani Taliban, or TPP), a militant group seeking to topple Pakistan’s government and impose its strict interpretation of Islamic law. The fallout may ripple beyond bilateral relations, with significant consequences for Central Asian trade, particularly the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan plan for a Trans-Afghan railway.
The planned 647-kilometer line is set to connect the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif with Peshawar in Pakistan. When combined with existing infrastructure, this will mean that trains can travel from southern Uzbekistan all the way to the Pakistani ports of Gwadar and Karachi, granting landlocked Uzbekistan and Afghanistan a long-sought gateway to the Indian Ocean. But mounting instability, along with Islamabad’s willingness to shut borders as leverage, may now place the project in serious jeopardy.
“The moment a state weaponizes geography, every financier in Tashkent, Moscow, or Beijing prices in risk, delays commitments, and quietly explores alternative alignments,” Anant Mishra, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the International Centre for Policing and Security at the University of South Wales, told The Times of Central Asia.
So, what are the prospects for salvaging the Trans-Afghan railway? How can Pakistan and Afghanistan de-escalate? And what does this turmoil mean for Central Asia’s wider economic ambitions?
A sudden frost
On July 17, Uzbekistan’s Transport Minister Ilkhom Makhkamov, Pakistan’s Railway Minister Muhammad Hanif Abbasi, and Afghanistan’s acting Public Works Minister Mohammad Esa Thani signed an agreement to conduct a feasibility study for the proposed railway.
Many hoped the railway would presage a new era of fraternal relations between Central and South Asia.
“Civil society, the intelligentsia, media, and business community of Pakistan have been loudly calling for intimate trade relations with the Central Asian Republics,” Khadim Hussain, Research Director at the Centre for Regional Policy and Dialogue (CRPD), Islamabad, told TCA.
For Uzbekistan, which has aggressively pursued diversification of trade routes to reduce reliance on transit through Iran and Kazakhstan, the project promised a cheaper, faster corridor to global markets.
According to Nargiza Umarova, Head of the Center for Strategic Connectivity at the Institute for Advanced International Studies, University of World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent, the trans-Afghan is one of two high-priority transport projects, along with the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway – work on which began in April 2025.
But the ink had barely dried on the July accord when tensions between Afghanistan’s Taliban government and Islamabad began escalating, throwing the ambitious railway into doubt.
Uzbek passenger and freight trains parked in Andijan; image: TCA, Joe Luc Barnes
In early October, Pakistan launched an airstrike in Kabul targeting the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. Kabul denounced what it described as violations of sovereignty, while Pakistan insisted it was acting against TTP militants operating from Afghan territory.
In response, on October 11, Taliban forces attacked military posts along large stretches of the 2,600-kilometre border between the two countries. In early November, a suicide bomber killed 12 people in Islamabad, the first such attack in the Pakistani capital in a decade.
It wasn’t long before the diplomatic fallout began to affect trade. Transit routes have been suspended as Pakistan attempts to squeeze the Afghan economy.
“Most of Afghanistan’s imports and exports have historically moved through Karachi and, to a lesser extent, Gwadar; when Torkham and Chaman border crossings are choked, trucks full of food, fruit, pharmaceuticals, and fuel sit idle, and Afghan traders suddenly have to pay more for longer, more complex routes,” said Mishra.
In November, Afghanistan’s deputy minister for economic affairs, Abdul Ghani Baradar, publicly urged Afghan businesses to secure alternative trade corridors within three months – a sign that officials expect a prolonged freeze.
Why this conflict erupted
At its core, the crisis resembles a classic Frankenstein’s monster dynamic: the force once cultivated as a proxy has turned against its creator. For decades, Pakistan supported the Taliban, providing sanctuary, funding, and political backing. The expectation was that a friendly Taliban government in Kabul would align with Islamabad’s interests.
Instead, Pakistan now faces a movement that rejects its control and is recalcitrant in reining in the TTP.
“Since 2021, the TTP has enjoyed unprecedented operational space inside Afghanistan, using Afghan territory as strategic depth to strike inside Pakistan and then exfiltrate back across the border,” said Mishra. “For Islamabad, this is now the primary national-security threat.”
For its part, Kabul denies supporting the Pakistani Taliban. However, according to Mishra, it has “consistently tolerated TTP mobility along the frontier, partly for ideological reasons, and partly because confronting them would fracture the Taliban’s own internal cohesion.”
Implications for Uzbekistan and Central Asia
Hussain is in no doubt as to the stakes. “Pakistan’s prioritization of relations with Central Asia will largely depend on normalization of relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said.
Mishra sees little prospect of that in the short term. “The most likely trajectory is a prolonged, low-intensity conflict… managed hostility rather than a genuine resolution.”
For Central Asia, the deterioration in Pakistan-Afghanistan relations threatens to derail years of regional planning. But while some fear Uzbekistan’s dream of a southern corridor may be forced back to the drawing board, Umarova takes a more long-term view.
“As soon as things get heated, some theories are immediately put forward that everything is lost, all projects need to be stopped, borders closed, and so on. But that’s not how it works,” she told TCA.
“This conflict has existed for many years. It didn’t arise yesterday. Naturally, when assessing the risks associated with the Afghan railway, Uzbekistan took into account the relationship between Islamabad and Kabul.” Umarova adds that despite the simmering tensions, “work on this project isn’t stopping; on the contrary, it’s intensifying”. This, she says, is a mark of the project’s strategic importance both for Uzbekistan and Central Asia as a whole.
Meanwhile, trade between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan continues to expand independently of Pakistan. Coal shipments from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan have increased significantly this year, with Uzbekistan exporting cement and pharmaceuticals in return.
“The Hairatan-Mazar-e-Sharif rail link from Uzbekistan… already gives Afghanistan a northern outlet,” said Mishra. “As ties with Pakistan sour, more cargo will bleed into those routes.”
From a diplomatic perspective, Tashkent has maintained pragmatic ties with the Taliban, positioning itself as a mediator that can engage all sides.
“It would naturally be naive to indulge in the illusion that Uzbekistan firmly trusts the current government in Afghanistan,” said Umarova, but Tashkent has nevertheless never ceased to maintain diplomatic contact with whoever is in power in Kabul, and has coordinated its approach with other Central Asian states.
She notes that a “unified approach to Afghanistan is gradually crystallizing,” with even hawkish states such as Tajikistan taking a softer line towards Kabul.
Kabul has also invested in diplomatic outreach to all five Central Asian states since 2021, entering into a bilateral agreement over the Qosh-Tepa canal at the provincial level, and even hosting the Uzbek prime minister in Kabul. “This is something Republic-era Afghanistan rarely achieved,” Mishra notes.
He believes that, in the long term, Islamabad’s recent actions will have “predictable strategic consequences” – Afghan trade will realign away from dependence on Pakistan.
“You can already see the shift accelerating. Kabul has openly said it is diverting ‘major trade routes’ from Pakistan towards Iran and Central Asia,” said Mishra. He notes that Kabul is now leaning heavily on Iranian ports, taking advantage of the tariff cuts that Tehran is offering.
Should these routes continue to expand, they could unlock a far larger prize: access to the Indian market. India is a key user of Iran’s Chabahar free port for the same reason that Afghanistan has been using it: its border with Pakistan is closed.
Chabahar has been largely free of U.S. sanctions since 2018, meaning it has the potential to turn into a major regional hub, with both India and Central Asia seeking to benefit. Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are all backing a project that will see another railway built through western Afghanistan to Herat before linking with Iran.
Nevertheless, both Umarova and Mishra agree that the trans-Afghan railway still represents an important alternative. Umarova notes the vulnerability of Iranian ports during the conflict with Israel earlier in 2025.
Mishra stresses the importance of having options: “They must build the Trans-Afghan railway, but in a way that can send cargo to Karachi when the region experiences strategic calm, or swing west to Iran and Chabahar when it is not,” he told TCA.
