The Asian Development Bank’s project data recorded the new border terminals at Torkham and Chaman as 85 and 87 per cent complete, respectively, on 30 June 2024. Commercial trade through both crossings has been suspended since 12 October 2025.
Between those two facts lies a question that public investment is rarely forced to answer: once a terminal is finished, how will anyone know whether it has made trade faster, cheaper and more predictable? Concrete can be photographed. Efficiency has to be measured, and the public record contains no comparable evaluation of whether these gates deliver it.
The terminals form part of the Integrated Transit Trade Management System (ITTMS), financed through the ADB’s US$ 300 million CAREC Regional Improving Border Services Project, which includes US$ 50 million from the government.
The Federal Board of Revenue is the executing agency, while the National Logistics Corporation builds the terminals. NLC sources reported 97 per cent progress in December 2024, on a different date and basis, and an inauguration was expected in February 2025.
I could not verify a source confirming formal commissioning or inauguration. Physical completion, formal commissioning and operational use are separate milestones. The available evidence documents physical progress but does not establish whether the terminals entered normal commercial operation.
The problem the project addresses is real. CAREC’s corridor monitoring recorded outbound crossing times of roughly 48 to 71 hours at Chaman and 24 to 50 hours at Torkham between 2019 and 2023, against a CAREC road-network mean of 9.9 to 15.1 hours.
Its 2024 report put Pakistan’s average border-clearance time at 38.1 hours. These figures predate the new terminals and therefore cannot establish their impact. However, they show the scale of pre-existing delays and point to problems that infrastructure alone cannot resolve, including customs inspection practices, paperwork and overlapping agency responsibilities.
The Torkham case study adds inadequate scanners, an unsuitable layout and numerous police checkpoints along the 55 kilometres between the two border stations.
Earlier customs reforms delivered separate gains. The FBR reports that import documentary-compliance time fell from 143 to 24 hours, although it does not credit ITTMS and provides no reference years.
The closure has deepened the difficulty. Afghan Transit Trade, as reported by Dawn from customs data, fell from 102,886 containers worth US$6.7 billion in FY2023 to 42,959 worth US$1.36 billion in FY2025, before the closure, and to 11,592 worth US$367 million in FY2026.
Reverse transit fell from US$454 million in FY2025 to US$7 million in FY2026.
Even limited reopenings have excluded commerce. Torkham reopened on 31 March 2026 for one-way movement, allowing returning Afghan migrants only.
The closure is an important factor, but not the only one. Dawn’s analysis also points to Afghanistan’s growing use of Iranian and Central Asian routes.
Pakistan authorised routes through Sost and towards Iran in April 2026, yet no official volume data have been published. Authorisation and trial shipments do not amount to durable trade diversion.
Trade-body loss estimates, such as the Rs278 billion that the Pak-Afghan Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry cites for Pakistan over nine months, rely on unpublished methods and are not audited losses.
This is why the suspension should be used for preparation rather than waiting. The policy viewpoint behind this article proposes four priorities, none of which any institution has yet endorsed, and most of which fall within existing mandates.
First, establish a baseline.
Three reference series exist and are not interchangeable: driver-reported crossing times, FBR processing times of 3.3 to 8 hours compiled for the project in 2015, and terminal timestamps that do not yet exist.
Recording gate arrival, declaration, examination start, release and exit consistently would allow Pakistan to measure dwell time directly.
Second, examine inspection and coordination.
Historical customs data can show examination rates and detection yield by cargo category, allowing risk-based selectivity to be reviewed within the law and with security agencies’ concurrence.
The Pakistan Land Port Authority Act 2025 may provide a statutory basis for stronger coordination. However, the authority’s operational status and existing legal mandates should be verified before assigning it additional responsibilities.
Third, publish monthly route-level data for Torkham, Chaman, Gabd, Taftan and Sost, with clearly stated definitions, so that trade diversion is demonstrated rather than merely asserted.
Fourth, commit to an independent evaluation 12 to 24 months after commercial traffic resumes. The evaluation should compare these crossings with comparable CAREC crossings and report median and 90th-percentile clearance times.
It must account for closures, cargo mix and the fact that the Afghan side remains a single lane against six planned on Pakistan’s side.
The suspension has interrupted the one test that matters: whether the terminals shorten crossings under normal trading conditions.
It has exposed a measurement gap: Pakistan cannot yet demonstrate whether the investment has delivered faster and more predictable clearance.
Success should therefore be judged by independently verifiable improvements in clearance time and reliability, not by construction-completion percentages alone.
Mr Mujtaba Arshad is a research associate at the Centre of Excellence for CPEC, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), Islamabad.
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