Did Pakistan Actually Open Its Transit Corridors to Iran?
Islamabad announced six transit routes. Shipping lines rerouted thousands of containers to Karachi and Gwadar. Three weeks later, not one point was operational.
Last month Pakistan launched the Pakistan-Iran Transit Corridor at a ceremony in Karachi. Director General of Transit Trade Customs Sanaullah Abro and Director Transit Muhammad Rashid flagged off the inaugural consignment: refrigerated trucks carrying frozen meat from Karachi to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, moving through Iranian territory under the TIR international road transport framework. The corridor activated the 2008 Pakistan-Iran Agreement on International Transport of Passengers and Goods by Road. Officials described it as a step toward reducing dependence on maritime routes and improving access to Central Asian markets.
Twelve days later, on April 25, Pakistan’s Ministry of Commerce issued a second, distinct instrument. The “Transit of Goods through Territory of Pakistan Order 2026,” SRO 691(I)/2026, designated six corridors for a different purpose: not Pakistani exports moving through Iran outward, but third-country cargo originating elsewhere and destined for Iran, rerouted through Pakistani ports and overland crossings to bypass the US Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports, imposed on April 13. The order came into immediate legal effect. More than 3,000 Iran-bound containers were already stranded at Karachi, dumped there by shipping lines after Iranian ports became inaccessible.
On approximately May 19, 2026, Business Recorder published the results of its investigation. All six transit points designated under the April 25 order were still not operational. The Federal Board of Revenue had not prescribed the customs procedures required to implement the Customs Act, 1969 provisions under which the order was to function. Shipping lines had arrived, offloaded Iran-bound containers, and departed. The containers had not moved. A Pakistani diplomat told The National: “They’re still sitting there.”
Pakistan had announced two corridors in twelve days. One moved frozen meat to Tashkent. The other, designed to move thousands of stranded containers to Tehran, moved nothing.
The gap between those two outcomes is the current state of Iran’s connectivity to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and the Iran-Pakistan Chamber of Commerce’s allegation that the UAE has actively obstructed Iran’s regional integration is the structural context in which that gap exists. But the obstruction is not the sole mechanism. The corridors are failing across at least four overlapping architectures: UAE financial leverage, American strategic alignment, a China-Pakistan fracture documented in leaked diplomatic cables, and a Pakistani military establishment whose current positioning serves none of those parties’ long-term corridor interests while serving all of their immediate ones.
The Document Behind the Pivot
On May 18, 2026, Drop Site News published the full text of Cable I-0678, a Pakistani diplomatic cipher stamped “Secret, No Circulation” and dated March 7, 2022. The document records a meeting in Washington between Pakistan’s then-ambassador Asad Majeed Khan and Donald Lu, then US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian affairs. According to the cable, Lu communicated that if the parliamentary no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Imran Khan succeeded, “all will be forgiven” in Washington.
Khan had visited Moscow on the day Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, had refused to condemn the invasion, and had maintained Pakistan’s independent posture on CPEC and Iran connectivity. On April 9, 2022, six weeks after the meeting in the cable, he was removed from office through a no-confidence vote, the first Pakistani prime minister removed by that mechanism. The State Department, asked to respond to Drop Site’s publication, said Pakistani politics were “a matter for the Pakistani people to decide” and did not address the cable’s contents.
Drop Site’s broader investigation, drawing on leaked documents and insider interviews, documented what followed Khan’s removal: Pakistan’s military establishment, under Field Marshal Asim Munir, delivered a posture shift that provided what American administrations had sought. That shift included Pakistan arming Ukraine through defence supply arrangements and, most recently, Munir serving as Washington’s primary back-channel mediator with Tehran during the US-Israel war on Iran. The architect of Pakistan’s CPEC slowdown is now simultaneously managing the diplomacy between the power conducting the war and the government whose commercial integration he has spent three years retarding.
The cipher does not establish that Washington engineered Khan’s removal. The State Department’s non-response does not confirm it. What the document establishes, read alongside the CPEC data and the non-operational transit points, is that Pakistan’s structural incentives since 2022 have been consistently aligned against Iran’s corridor ambitions.
The CPEC Freeze in Numbers
Of approximately 90 projects envisioned under CPEC’s original framework, 38 have been completed as of 2026. No flagship project has entered the pipeline since 2022. The ML-1 railway, a $6.8 billion upgrade of the 1,872-kilometre main line from Karachi to Peshawar, remains locked in financing disputes. Pakistan and China agreed in October 2024 to split the project into two phases, with Phase I covering 929 kilometres at $3.2 billion. As of early 2026, the bidding process had not commenced. The Gwadar coal power plant, a 300-megawatt Chinese-funded facility required to make the port operationally viable, missed its 2023 completion target, then its 2025 target, and remains in a tariff dispute with Pakistan’s power regulator.
Between 2005 and 2024, China invested $68 billion in Pakistan’s economy, 74 percent of it in energy under CPEC. By 2024, CPEC power operators were owed $1.4 billion in unpaid receivables from Pakistan’s Central Power Purchasing Agency. In May 2023, the Port Qasim Electric Power Company served a formal default notice to the Agency for PKR 77.3 billion in overdue payments. By October 2024, that figure had reached PKR 88 billion.
The Special Investment Facilitation Council, established in June 2023 and co-chaired by the Prime Minister and Chief of Army Staff, was framed as a mechanism to fast-track foreign investment. Its operational output has run in a different direction. Pakistan Today reported in March 2025 that SIFC-approved projects worth tens of billions of dollars were orientated almost entirely toward Gulf Cooperation Council capital. Saudi Arabia and the UAE each received promises of $25 billion in five-year investment from Pakistan’s leadership. China, Pakistan’s largest source of foreign investment for a decade, was absent from the SIFC pipeline. The council designed to complement CPEC became, in practice, the instrument through which Gulf capital replaced Chinese infrastructure planning in Pakistan’s approvals queue.
Iran’s corridor depends on the Pakistani end of the chain. Without a functioning Gwadar with reliable power and logistics infrastructure, the Mirjaveh-Quetta onward rail link has no viable terminus. Without ML-1, overland freight moving north from Gwadar toward Central Asia remains commercially unviable. The SIFC’s operational record is structurally consistent with Gulf obstruction of that outcome, whether or not obstruction was its stated design.
The China Fracture
In a separate investigation published on Drop Site News, reported that during bilateral talks in 2024, Pakistan had asked China for assistance in developing a sea-based nuclear second-strike capability, offering expanded Chinese military access to Gwadar port in exchange. Beijing declined, describing the request as unreasonable and citing international non-proliferation commitments. Neither government has issued official confirmation or denial.
The report, corroborated across multiple defence analysis outlets, is consistent with a documented pattern. China is currently delivering eight Hangor-class conventional submarines to Pakistan under a $5 billion agreement and commissioned the lead vessel in April 2026. It has not transferred nuclear submarine technology. Pakistan has not offered China unconditional Gwadar military access.
The significance for Iran’s corridor is about bilateral trust, not military hardware. Pakistan owes Chinese CPEC operators $1.4 billion in unpaid receivables. Between 2021 and late 2024, at least 14 terrorist attacks killed 20 Chinese nationals on CPEC projects in Balochistan. Beijing has committed no new flagship infrastructure to the corridor since 2022. A multi-billion dollar rail integration with Iran that would benefit Chinese trade and complete the BRI’s western flank requires a level of Chinese confidence in Pakistani commitment that the current record does not support.
The UAE’s Financial Architecture
The UAE’s influence over Pakistani infrastructure policy is recorded in the sequence of deposit rollovers that sustained Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves through three crises. In January 2024, two $1 billion UAE deposits were extended for a year. The same happened in January 2025. The IMF’s $7 billion Extended Fund Facility, signed in September 2024, explicitly acknowledged UAE deposits as a structural pillar of Pakistan’s reserve position.
In January 2026, Pakistan sought another 12-month extension. The UAE declined. According to The Diplomat’s documentation of the timeline, the UAE “remained non-committal and only extended deposit on monthly basis until end March 2026, when it sought return of all deposits.” Pakistan repaid $3.5 billion in April 2026. The repayment demand coincided with Pakistan’s Iran war mediation role, its refusal to condemn Iran’s Hormuz closure, and a series of high-level visits to Islamabad by Iranian officials. The Geopolitical Monitor noted that “the UAE shifted from longer extensions toward monthly rollovers immediately after regional tensions intensified.”
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry described the repayment as routine. The Diplomat’s documentation of the timing does not support that framing. Whether it constitutes direct coercion over Pakistan’s Iran policy or a commercially timed maturation is officially disputed. Pakistan repaid the deposits, then twelve days later issued the April 25 transit order, which produced no operational transit points. That is the documented sequence.
The UAE’s structural stake in that outcome is not obscure. Iran has historically relied on Jebel Ali and Fujairah for imports and transit, a dependency that sanctions created and Gulf re-export infrastructure monetised. The tens of billions of dollars in Iranian-linked cargo estimated to transit UAE hubs annually constitutes a revenue stream whose existence depends on Iran not having a direct overland alternative. An Iran with functioning rail connectivity into CPEC and overland access to Chinese supply chains through Pakistan would not destroy Jebel Ali. It would give Iranian importers the choice to bypass it.
DP World, the Dubai state-owned port company, operates the Qasim International Container Terminal at Port Qasim in Karachi, Pakistan’s primary container facility, handling the majority of the country’s containerised trade. The Iran-bound containers stranded in Karachi after the April 25 order failed to produce operational transit points are sitting at a terminal operated by the same corporate entity that runs the port from which they were diverted. The April 25 order allowed them to move. The Federal Board of Revenue procedures that would have enabled that movement were not issued.
The Chabahar Variable
The Iranian side of the corridor has its own delays. The Chabahar-Zahedan railway, a 628-kilometre line connecting Chabahar port to the Iranian national rail network, began construction in 2010. The Zahedan-Khash segment was inaugurated in November 2022. As of late January 2026, Iranian officials reported overall substructure at 96 percent complete, track-laying at 75 percent, and key stations including Iranshahr ready for operation. Full completion is now projected for end-2026, with operational status expected mid-2027. The original completion date was 2024.
The delays reflect documented constraints: sanctions-related procurement difficulties on equipment supply; domestic funding gaps; terrain challenges in Sistan-Baluchestan. The Iran-Pakistan Chamber attributed part of the delay to Gulf obstruction on the Pakistani side. That attribution concerns the onward link: the Mirjaveh-Quetta connection that would integrate the Iranian network into CPEC. That link has no funded project structure, no completion date, and no Chinese capital commitment. The Chabahar-Zahedan railway terminates at Zahedan. The corridor to Gwadar, the one the Chamber was describing, has not started.
Iran has responded to the war’s maritime constraints by developing overland alternatives at scale. Iranian officials reported nearly 20 million tonnes of transit cargo in 2025 across ten operational corridors connecting to Central Asia, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. With the Hormuz blockade disrupting maritime access since April 13, those corridors are not supplementary infrastructure. They are Iran’s primary logistics system under naval siege conditions.
The April 13 Pakistan-Iran Transit Corridor that did function, the TIR road freight system that moved frozen meat from Karachi to Tashkent, is part of that overland architecture. It is road freight across terrain requiring truck convoys, not the high-volume containerised rail flow that the broader corridor vision describes. It is a functional workaround. It is not the corridor the Chamber documented.
The Alignment
In January 2026, the UAE signed a Letter of Intent on a Strategic Defence Partnership with India. The Middle East Forum described the move as signalling to “both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.” The Abraham Accords framework, which had formally aligned the UAE with Israel and the United States in a structure from which Iran was explicitly excluded, was being reinforced at the moment when Pakistan was moving toward Iran in its mediation role.
The Pakistan-Russia railway agreement, signed through a June 2024 MOU at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, planned a cargo route from Lahore to Astrakhan via Iran, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. The inaugural service was scheduled for June 2026. The Iran war closed the relevant borders. The service has been postponed indefinitely.
The corridor Iran was building had multiple dependent variables. The UAE held one, through financial leverage in Islamabad and through the structural interests that both Jebel Ali’s transit revenues and DP World’s Pakistani operations created. Washington held another, through IMF conditionality, through the cipher whose specific contents the State Department did not deny, and through the military relationship that positioned Munir as the mediator for the war that simultaneously blocked Iran’s maritime access and stalled the land-corridor response to it. China’s confidence in Pakistani commitment, eroded by $1.4 billion in unpaid receivables and 14 fatal attacks on its nationals, held a third variable. Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue held the fourth: the procedural instrument that would have moved 3,000 stranded containers. It did not issue it.
Whether that last failure was deliberate is not established by the Business Recorder record. The record establishes the outcome. The containers are still on the dock.
What the six transit points look like once the war ends, and whether the Federal Board of Revenue prescribes the procedures that make them operational, is the question none of the relevant parties have answered.