Peshawar

Eighty percent of NATO supplies entering Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014 rolled through the Khyber Pass on trucks that loaded in Peshawar — the same 53-kilometre corridor that Alexander the Great, the Mughals, and the British Empire used to project power into the subcontinent. Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, is a city of 4.8 million that has functioned as a gateway between Central Asia and South Asia for over two millennia.

The ancient transit narrative understates the economic structure that role creates. Peshawar doesn't simply sit near a border; it metabolises the border. The formal economy runs on transport and cross-border trade with Afghanistan, articulated through a well-developed import-export network where caravans once crossed the Khyber Pass twice weekly. The informal economy — smuggling, hawala transfers, arms trading — has been inseparable from the formal one since the Soviet-Afghan War flooded the city with 3.

3 million refugees in 340 border camps by 1988. Today, roughly 700,000 registered Afghan refugees remain in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with the actual number far higher. Afghan refugees transformed Peshawar's labour market: willing to work for lower wages, they pushed the city to Pakistan's lowest unskilled wage rate while simultaneously generating new businesses — rug trading, restaurants, international commerce — that operate across national boundaries as easily as ecological populations cross biome edges.

Pakistan's 486-kilometre border fence, completed around Torkham crossing by 2018, represents an attempt to impose a hard boundary on what functions ecologically as a gradient. The biological parallel is source-sink dynamics: Afghanistan generates population outflows driven by conflict (the source), and Peshawar absorbs them (the sink), gaining labour and commercial energy while bearing the costs of depressed wages, drug trafficking, and security instability. The relationship is neither purely parasitic nor purely mutualistic — it is commensalism trending toward mutualism, where the host benefits from the guest's economic activity but bears asymmetric security costs that no border fence fully resolves.