Taliban's Wakhan road reaches China's border, but without a crossing to use it

At the Wakhjir Pass, nearly 4,900 metres up, Afghanistan stops and China starts. Snow shuts the pass for at least five months a year, and even in the open months only a few people cross. There is no official border post. On October 4, the Taliban-led government nonetheless celebrated the opening of a road that runs to the frontier and no further.

Afghanistan's Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development says the road through the Wakhan Corridor in Badakhshan province was built in two phases for 365 million afghanis, about $5.5 million. It is an unpaved gravel track. On the Chinese side there is no customs facility, and China's Foreign Ministry has not commented on the opening. For now the road ends at a closed border, with no sign of when Beijing might allow commercial traffic.

The corridor is a thin strip of Afghan land about 350 kilometres long, wedged between Tajikistan to the north and Pakistan to the south, reaching China. Its shape comes from the 19th-century rivalry between Britain and Russia. An 1895 agreement set Afghanistan's northern boundary and left Wakhan under Kabul so that Russian-held land would not touch British India. China was not party to that arrangement, and Kabul and Beijing did not settle their border until 1963.

Talk of a road began in June 2009, in discussions between the Afghan and Chinese governments, but went no further than preliminary studies. Rugged terrain was cited as the main obstacle, and the Chinese press raised fears that Uighur fighters could use the corridor to enter China. The idea sat frozen until 2019, when Afghanistan began building; former ambassador to China Javid Qaem says 60 kilometres were completed before the August 2021 Taliban takeover led to the plan being postponed. Former acting defence minister Shah Mahmoud Miakhel, who left office a few months before the takeover, says the presence of US and foreign forces and the security situation held the project back, and that Beijing saw those conditions as limiting the corridor's prospects.

The Taliban revived it. Qaem says construction resumed in September 2023, with Kabul seeking Chinese financial support, but China has not agreed to open the border over security threats. In January 2024 the Taliban announced the road had reached the Chinese frontier. In March 2025 the rural development ministry signed with local companies for a second phase of 71 kilometres. Authorities say the money is Afghan government funding, and nothing available points to Chinese financing.

Beijing's focus is security. In August 2025 Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the most senior Chinese official to visit since the Taliban returned and on his second Kabul visit since then, told Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani that China supports the early resumption of bilateral patrols in the corridor. He also urged a crackdown on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Uighur separatist group. An anonymous Afghan government source says China does not oppose opening the border but ties it to effective security guarantees, and that the Taliban have shown they can secure it. Wider Chinese investment has also stalled: in June 2025 the Taliban cancelled an oil exploration contract in the Amu Darya Basin with a Chinese company for unmet obligations, and in May this year Afghanistan's mining minister complained to China's ambassador about delays at the Mes Aynak copper mine, which has yet to produce. Afghanistan and Bhutan are the only countries bordering China without a direct overland trade crossing.

Kabul's motive is to escape dependence on Pakistan. Landlocked Afghanistan reaches the sea through Pakistan and Iran, and over the past year both routes have been all but closed at once. Mohammad Ismail Ghaznawi, now deputy minister of public works for road maintenance and formerly Badakhshan's governor, called the road part of a plan to diversify trade outlets, pointing to this year's fighting between Afghan and Pakistani forces and to the US-Israel war on Iran. Kabul sees the road as the start of a trade corridor, perhaps a railway later, tied to the Belt and Road Initiative and earning transit fees. China, meanwhile, keeps urging that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor be extended into Afghanistan, and a gravel road closed by snow cannot replace Torkham, which once carried a large share of Afghan-Pakistani trade. Former ambassador to Iran Abdul Ghafoor Liwal says Tehran sees Wakhan as a strategic opportunity for an overland link to China.

Badakhshan itself is less calm than Kabul suggests. Rare protests against poppy eradication broke out in May 2024, and the opposition National Resistance Front has claimed several recent attacks. Hours after the opening ceremony, it said it had killed the deputy head of Taliban intelligence in Faizabad, the provincial capital. Miakhel sees attempts to obstruct the corridor, which he describes as his personal assessment. Whether the road ever carries trade depends on whether Beijing's security demands and Kabul's economic goals can be reconciled.