Guest OpEd
Listen to the official statements emerging from Islamabad and Kabul these days, and you hear the familiar rhythm of a narrative that has become almost comforting in its predictability. Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of harboring terrorists who strike inside its borders. Afghanistan condemns Pakistan for violating its airspace with military strikes. Both sides invoke betrayal, both speak of security threats that justify military action, and both wrap their positions in the language of wounded national honor.
The rhetoric feels righteous, the moral framing unassailable, and the subtext ominously clear: war may be inevitable. None of this is fiction. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan does operate from Afghan territory. Pakistani airstrikes do breach Afghan sovereignty. These are facts. But facts and truth are not the same thing. The truth the one that actually matters lives beneath this convenient narrative of security and betrayal. It is a story about money. About trade routes, port revenues, and economic corridors worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year. It’s a story neither government wants to tell publicly, because the one they are telling about terrorism and national defense is far more politically useful.
The inconvenient truth is simple: neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan can afford the war they are drifting toward. More precisely, neither can survive its economic consequences. Yet both continue to speak as though military victory is possible, as if security justifications somehow override the mathematics of national bankruptcy. Pakistan has knocked on the International Monetary Fund’s door five times since 2000. Five separate bailouts. Five cycles of austerity, tax hikes, and foreign supervision. India needed such intervention once in 1993. Today, India’s economy surges ahead while Pakistan’s stagnates, trapped in a kind of economic purgatory where growth seems perpetually out of reach. The rupee, once 52 to the dollar in 2000, now trades at around 220. Manufacturing has withered. Real wages have frozen. And a nation of 220 million watches its country fall further behind.
Afghanistan’s situation is even more devastating. Eighty-five percent of its people around thirty-five million live on less than one dollar a day. The Taliban’s return to power in 2021 detonated the economy, triggering a 27 percent collapse in GDP. International aid vanished overnight. The central bank’s $9.5 billion in foreign reserves was frozen. After three years of slow recovery, Afghanistan has only clawed back to roughly 70 percent of its pre-2021 size. It cannot fund basic services, let alone wage a war. And yet, the war talk grows louder. Why? Because the security narrative is politically useful. It’s far easier to invoke national honor than to tell your people the truth: we cannot afford to fight because we are already broke. The conflict isn’t truly about ideology or territory. It’s about trade corridors. About Afghanistan’s landlocked geography and Pakistan’s three seaports Karachi, Port Qasim, and Gwadar. Every Afghan export that reaches global markets moves through one of these ports. Every machine, medicine, or raw material Afghanistan imports arrives the same way. There is no credible alternative. Iran exists, but its routes are expensive and politically entangled. For Afghanistan, Pakistan’s ports aren’t just an option they’re a lifeline.
For Pakistan, the calculus is different but equally vital. Central Asia Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan is resource-rich and landlocked. These countries need corridors to trade with the world. Through Afghanistan, Pakistani ports become their gateways. This generates hundreds of millions in transit fees, port revenues, logistics jobs, and economic activity between $400 and $500 million annually by current estimates. Economists say that if the corridor functions reliably, it could eventually reach several billion. For a country drowning in debt and losing foreign investment, this isn’t marginal it’s existential. This corridor represents the difference between continued decline and potential recovery. Both nations have stumbled upon an economic symbiosis that could benefit them immensely. And both are now destroying it.
We don’t need to guess what happens when this corridor falters. The recent past already shows us. In 2024 and early 2025, as tensions flared, the numbers collapsed. Transit trade that reached $2.24 billion in one fiscal year fell to just $754 million in the next—a 66 percent plunge. Some months saw drops as high as 84 percent. Bilateral trade shrank from $2.5 billion to $1 billion. Afghan traders lost half a million dollars a day during peak border closures. Pakistani ports went idle. Thousands of workers lost their jobs. Small businesses vanished. And that was without war just political tension. It still cost both nations hundreds of millions within weeks. A full-scale conflict would be a permanent rupture. The border wouldn’t reopen in days or weeks it would be sealed indefinitely. Trade wouldn’t pause; it would relocate. Once supply chains and business relationships shift, they don’t return.
Afghanistan-Iran trade has already surged 25 percent in recent years, climbing from $1.5 billion to $2 billion annually. Iran now accounts for a quarter of Afghanistan’s total foreign trade. Not because it offers better value but because Pakistan has become unreliable. Afghan traders are making rational choices: when a neighbor is unpredictable, you find another route. Central Asian nations are doing the same. China is building bypasses. Russia is deepening partnerships. India is developing Chabahar Port in Iran as an alternate route. Billions have already been committed to these alternatives. Each month of instability accelerates this shift. A war would finalize it. Pakistan wouldn’t just lose current revenue it would surrender its strategic relevance for a generation.
Both nations lack the means to wage war. Pakistan’s debt servicing devours most of its budget. Funds meant for schools and hospitals go to creditors. The government can’t borrow for prolonged military operations without risking a currency collapse. Foreign investors would flee at the first sign of open conflict. Afghanistan’s constraints are even tighter. The Taliban can’t borrow from the IMF or World Bank. It can’t issue bonds. It survives on whatever revenue it collects internally. The notion that it could finance a sustained war is pure fantasy. Both nations are financially immobilized. Yet their leaders speak as if military escalation is within reach. This disconnect between what leaders say and what their economies can actually sustain is the heart of the crisis.
For Pakistan’s military, tensions with Afghanistan justify budgets, influence, and strategic relevance. For the Taliban, defending Afghan sovereignty gives them domestic legitimacy. For both, invoking terrorism is politically safe it spares them from admitting the real situation: we are desperate, and cooperation is our only path forward. But this political theater carries immense costs. Every border closure fractures trust further. Every strike erodes investor confidence. The “security” narrative isn’t just hollow it’s economically suicidal. What’s needed now is honesty, something neither government has shown. Pakistan’s leaders must tell their people: we cannot afford a war with Afghanistan. Our debt is unsustainable. Our currency is collapsing. Our only path to recovery lies through Central Asian trade and that requires stability, not conflict. A war would destroy that permanently. Afghanistan’s leaders must face their own truth: we are desperately poor. We depend entirely on Pakistan’s ports for access to the world. We cannot survive without them. Iranian routes cannot sustain our economy. A war would choke our only remaining lifeline. These admissions would be politically painful but they would be true. And truth may be the only thing capable of preventing disaster.
The October ceasefire bought time, nothing more. Unless both sides abandon the illusion of security through strength and confront the economic reality in front of them, that time will run out. The next escalation will be worse. The next closure longer. The next round of posturing more destructive. Eventually, the trade corridor will migrate elsewhere. Pakistan will lose its last chance at recovery. Afghanistan will fall deeper into Iranian dependency. Both nations will have destroyed themselves economically in pursuit of security victories that were never winnable.
Follow the money, not the narrative. The money tells a different story. It says cooperation is survival. It says war is suicide dressed up as national honor. And if either nation’s leaders are truly thinking strategically, they must start listening to what the numbers are already screaming because the numbers never lie. They only tell truths that governments are too afraid to say aloud.