Long live our Mir!” shouted the Uzbek warriors who greeted the East India Company spy Mohan Lal Zutshi at the gates of Kunduz in the summer of 1832, waving their silver maces in the air. The warriors’ pious hope was at a right angle to reality, Zutshi recorded: The ruler of the province, the Uzbek warlord Mir Murad Ali Beg, was nearing his end. “Debauchery, which he had carried to an extreme point, has now produced fits, which succeed each other at frequent intervals, and have rendered him unable to transact business.”
The end would matter little, though. The business of the state was being capably handled by Diwan Begi, or prime minister Atma Ram, a Hindu trader from Peshawar. “Notwithstanding he adheres to all the customs of the Hindu religion, and is partial to his countrymen, yet he is respected by all Mohammedans”.
Even some fragile cultural norms had been waived for Atma Ram: “Being a man of distinction, he keeps a great number of Mohammedan slave-girls and boys, which privilege is not allowed to any other Hindu in Turkistan.”
Last week, when the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan set a 3-month deadline for traders to terminate their business with Pakistan, it marked a dramatic rebellion against history. For five centuries, the Khatri and Bania communities of Punjab ran a remarkable web of trading links running north through the small town of Shikarpur, at the entry to the Bolan Pass, to Odessa and even St. Petersburg.
Fighting has often flared along the disputed Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but after the recent clashes, which left cargoes of perishable farm goods rotting at the Torkham crossing, Taliban Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Gani Baradar asked traders to “redirect their trade toward other alternative routes instead of Pakistan.” That is easier said than done: Pakistan is Afghanistan’s largest single trading partner, taking in 45 per cent of Afghan exports in 2024.
The Taliban seem to have decided that some economic hardship is an acceptable price to pay for freeing Afghanistan from the economic chokehold exercised by Pakistan. That change has been underway even before the Islamic Emirate took power in 2021. From $5 billion in 2011, the journalist Farangis Najibullah notes, trade with Pakistan has fallen to just over $1 billion in 2024. Trade with the five Central Asian states—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—has grown to over $1.7 billion.
Leaders of the Taliban hope these ties will let it fundamentally reshape its place in the world. The support of India will be critical—just as it was two hundred years ago.
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Hindu traders, Islamic worlds
For centuries, the most reliable, fast trade routes out of Afghanistan have run south from Kabul, stretching on to the port at Karachi. The reason for this, however, was not ordained by nature. Fed up with attacks on trade caravans, historian Stephen Dale explains, the Emperor Akbar built a series of fortified caravanserais along the road from Attock to Kabul in 1587. Tribes like the Kakar, who made a living from raiding, were punished. Less than a decade later, the road had been upgraded to cope with wheeled traffic.
Trade blossomed. Exports of textiles, indigo and sugar paid for the import of thousands of Turkic horses into India. Marwari and Aggarwal businessmen expanded their businesses west, trading linen through the port of Bandar Abbas in Iran.
FA Kotov, a Russian merchant who travelled to Iran’s Isfahan in 1623, saw both Hindu and Muslim merchants from Multan in the city. Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician, estimated that about 10,000 Multan-origin merchants were living in the city in 1684-1685. Large numbers of Indian men married Turkic women in Astrakhan to populate an entire suburb, Agrizhan.
A large number of Hindus, the imperial proconsul in Afghanistan, Mountstuart Elphinstone wrote in the 1980s, were “brokers, merchants, bankers, goldsmiths, [and] sellers of grain.” Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand also had large Hindu populations, historian Scott Levi notes.
“The reason why Shikarpur surpasses Amritsar in wealth,” observed the East India Company agent Mohan Lal, “is that its inhabitants, who are for the most part Khatris, have spread themselves in almost all the regions of Central Asia.” “You will see all the shopkeepers writing hoondees, or bills of
exchange, which you can take in the name of their agents at Bombay, Sindh, the Panjab, Khorasan, Afghanistan, part of Persia, and Russia.
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The state of war
Afghan kings, however, struggled to create the kind of state apparatus that could modernise the country and link their economy to the great ports of the Indian Ocean. Their challenges included constant uprisings against the central authority. The regime of Emir Abdur Rahman, considered the founder of modern Afghanistan, faced over forty rebellions, which it crushed by deploying an army of over 82,000 men. Forces of this scale, however, were hard for the treasury to sustain, and future rulers relied on mobilising tribes against insurrections—further weakening central authority.
From 1953, political scientist Antonio Giustozzi writes, the regime of Prime Minister Muhammad Daud Khan attempted to create a centralised, national consciousness by focusing on the issue of reclaiming ethnic-Pashtun territories ceded to the British Empire. This, however, led to a low-grade war with Pakistan, forcing Khan to retreat.
A brief attempt at liberalisation under King Zahir Shah soon stalled. In the elections of 1969, a Parliament dominated by conservative elements: Landlords, tribal leaders and clerics came to power. Together with a decline in foreign aid and the refusal of Parliament to impose new taxes to compensate, the state lurched deeper toward crisis. Two-thirds of the Afghan industry was state-owned, but did not create enough jobs to meet the aspirations of a new, educated class—a class which turned to the far-Left.
The result was an unstable polity and a fragile aid-dependent economy, which lurched from crisis to crisis. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the long civil war in Afghanistan shut down markets to the country’s north and deepened its dependence on Pakistan.
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The Taliban’s gamble
Few had expected that the Islamic Emirate would push back against Pakistan in the way it has. Ever since the Taliban took power in August 2021, Afghanistan’s economy contracted by a quarter. Although taxation revenues have expanded, and new buildings are coming up in Kabul, the Taliban have been forced to cut salaries and lay off employees. Likely, the Taliban has concluded that Pakistan will not be able to help it grow its economy in any significant way. Thus, it is bartering short-term pain for strategic autonomy.
Likely, Taliban leaders believe that partnering with Pakistan in its war against the Tehreek-e-Taliban will force them into a long, expensive military campaign that will inflict further political unpopularity for uncertain military gains.
There’s no way of telling just how this break will play out in the long term. To pivot Afghanistan’s economy from its dependence on Pakistan to one based on ties with Central Asia, Iran and China, involves significant logistical challenges and investments. Afghanistan’s neighbours have been supportive of its break with Pakistan—with Iran offering significant subsidies for freight routed through its territory—but that isn’t a solution. The support of India for creating logistical infrastructure through Iran will be critical.
Following the Partition of India, Afghanistan was left almost completely dependent on a hostile neighbour, further hit by the breakup of the Indian commercial networks which tied it to Iran and Central Asia. The Taliban is betting that time and geopolitical circumstances will let it rebuild those networks. This is a big bet—with potentially seismic consequences.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)