Bilateral trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan has fallen by roughly 95%, and transit traffic through both countries has effectively stopped, Hiru News reported on Saturday evening, citing foreign media.

The figure comes from the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan (TDAP) and covers the 2026-27 fiscal year against the one before it.

The date this story actually belongs to

This is a Saturday filing about a much older set of numbers, and readers should have the sequence plainly.

The TDAP data showing the 95% fall was released in August. It was written up by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn on Monday 19 October, in a feature on the commercial cost of the border closure, and reached Sinhala readers through Hiru five days after that. The border crossings at the centre of it closed on 12 October 2025 — more than a year ago.

Nothing in Saturday’s report is a new announcement. What is current is the condition it describes: a trade relationship that has not recovered.

What the trade bodies say

Mohammad Younus Mohmand, Vice President of the Afghan chapter of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the collapse has paralysed the movement of goods in both directions.

“We no longer have trade with Pakistan. Our transit via Pakistan and Pakistan’s transit via Afghanistan to Central Asia have come to a complete halt.”

That second clause is the part with the wider reach. Afghanistan is the land route by which Pakistani goods travel to Central Asia, and Pakistan is the route by which landlocked Afghanistan reaches the sea. The closure removes both at once.

How the border came to be shut

Pakistan closed its main crossings with Afghanistan on 12 October 2025, after deadly clashes between Pakistani forces and the Afghan Taliban. Islamabad has said it is prepared to reopen them only if the Taliban administration acts against militant groups operating from Afghan soil — a position it stated in September.

Pakistan accuses the Afghan Taliban of sheltering Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which claims responsibility for attacks inside Pakistan. The Taliban publicly deny harbouring any militant group.

One qualification Hiru’s account leaves out: the outlet it is working from pairs that denial with a United Nations report that documents the opposite. The denial is reported in isolation in the Sinhala version, which makes it look less contested than it is.

The scale, from the Pakistani reporting

Dawn’s 19 October feature — which this desk read directly but cannot cite as a source, as it falls outside our freshness window and is not among our verified newsrooms — supplies the figures behind the headline percentage.

Bilateral trade fell from $1.3 billion in 2024-25 to $358 million in 2025-26, a drop of about 74%, before the further 95% fall recorded for 2026-27. Afghan transit trade, which ran at nearly 89,000 containers worth about $5 billion before the Taliban’s return, had fallen to 11,592 containers worth $367 million.

Besides Torkham, the crossings at Kharlachi, Ghulam Khan and Angoor Adda in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Chaman in Balochistan have stayed closed to all trade. Dawn’s own photograph from Torkham shows goods trucks still parked at the terminal.

Not reported

Hiru gives no Sri Lankan angle, and there is no indication that Sri Lankan trade or shipping is affected. It does not say whether talks are under way, name any mediating party, or give a Taliban response to the trade figures themselves.

This story is single-sourced. Hiru News is the only verified newsroom in this desk’s list to have filed on it. The chain behind it — Voice of America on 23 October, Dawn on 19 October, TDAP in August — was checked directly and is described above, but none of those outlets is on our verified list, and the two older filings fall outside the 72-hour window in any case.