[1] The 1965 agreement did not offer Pakistan reciprocal rights to export goods to the Soviet Union, nor to the Central Asian Republics after the fall of the USSR.
[3] In addition to illegal transfer of goods back into Pakistan, items declared as Afghanistan-bound were often prematurely offloaded from trucks and smuggled into Pakistani markets without paying requisite duty fees.
[6] In Pakistan clamped down in 2003 on the types of goods permitted duty-free transit, and introducing stringent measures and labels to prevent smuggling.
In July 2010, a Memorandum of understanding (MoU) was reached between Pakistan and Afghanistan for the Afghan-Pak Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA), which was observed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The ceremony was attended by Richard Holbrooke, US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a number of foreign ambassadors, Afghan parliamentarians and senior officials.
[20] Afghanistan has complained that anti-smuggling security measures agreed in the APTTA are restrictive cost-prohibitive, and that banking guarantee fees are excessively high and time-consuming, ranging from 100,000 to 150,000 Pakistani rupees per carrier.
In November 2010, the two states formed a joint chamber of commerce to expand trade relations and solve the problems traders face in this and other regards.
[34] Projects currently under construction include the a system of motorways and upgraded roads from the Pakistani coastal cities of Karachi and Gwadar, all the way to the Chinese border and onwards to Kashgar in China's Xinjiang province.
From Kashgar, transport links to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have been upgraded, while seasonal road access to Tajikistan is provided by the Pamir Highway.
Owing to this frustration, and ongoing construction of roadway projects to China under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Pakistani Government in February 2016 signalled its intention to completely bypass Afghanistan in its quest to access Central Asia by announcing its intent to revive the Quadrilateral Traffic in Transit Agreement so that Central Asian states could access Pakistani ports via Kashgar instead of Afghanistan,[35] thereby allowing the Central Asian republics to access Pakistan's deep water ports without having to rely on a politically unstable Afghanistan as a transit corridor.
In early March 2016, the Afghan government reportedly acquiesced to Pakistani requests to use Afghanistan as a corridor to Tajikistan, after having dropped demands from reciprocal access to India via Pakistan.