Impact of Trade Policies on Pakistan and Afghanistan

Afghanistan has opened a route for itself, but Pakistan has gained nothing

from it. Pakistan's situation with Afghanistan has been like this for over a year.

Trade is closed, and Pakistan has suffered losses of billions of dollars.

The traders involved have, poor things, gone bankrupt on both sides.

And during this, in Pakistan, Pakistan's

establishment, its planners,

thought that if

we closed Afghanistan's trade route, pressure on Afghanistan

would increase, and Pakistan could get all its demands accepted

that Pakistan has kept making. But it seems

the result is turning out to be the exact opposite. Due to this trade closure,

Afghan media say that 95 percent of trade has been shut down.

However, the greatest impact is on Pakistan's pharmaceutical industry.

Because

Pakistan's market was not just Afghanistan, but through Afghanistan, Central

Asia also wanted Pakistani products. So Pakistan's

pharmaceutical industry is incurring very great losses, and

it is worsening because Pakistan has lost that market in Afghanistan as well as

Central

Asia. This is creating considerable difficulties for it as well. Whereas

What has Afghanistan done now? It has now opened

its trade route with Turkey

by rail. Reports today say Afghanistan has, via the Herat

Khaf railway, which connects it to Iran, exported to Turkey

its first large shipment of six hundred tons of cotton.

And besides this, another major development is that China, too,

has opened a direct trade route with Afghanistan

They have launched a freight train service. In this regard

today, visuals are coming from China showing that a train from there

has departed for Afghanistan, carrying Afghanistan's goods.

Afghanistan's goods will now arrive directly in Afghanistan by train. Now,

what was the outcome of that policy which Pakistan's

state had devised, and perhaps Parliament had no role in it?

It was that Pakistan has now lost the

leverage it had over Afghanistan, through which it could exert some pressure,

and it will perhaps lose even more because,

as this trade grows, whenever the war between Iran and

America comes completely to an end, you will see that

Iran will become the main transit route, whether through its ports,

namely Chabahar and Bandar Abbas, which Afghanistan already uses

whether by road or by rail to Turkey. As a result of this policy,

Pakistan was cut off from Afghanistan. Pakistan was cut off from Central Asia.

Pakistan's planned gas pipeline with Turkmenistan

has also now suffered further delays, at a time when Pakistan

is in dire need of gas. Pakistan is an energy- deficient country. So,

this is the result of a wrong policy, the consequences of which we are now

seeing, as Afghanistan is becoming increasingly cut off from Pakistan

and has sought out new routes for itself.