A Pakistani cargo truck transported medicine from Karachi to Tashkent, Uzbekistan through Kabul earlier this month. The cargo took back a shipment of leather products from Tashkent to Pakistan’s city of Faisalabad on May 13.
This marked a major milestone for regional economic integration as Pakistan and Uzbekistan traded goods through Afghanistan for the first time ever.
Supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the shipment cargo is one of the five trial runs to test the feasibility of the various routes in the region. 
The USAID in collaboration with TCS Logistics (Pakistan), successfully launched the first pilot shipment to Central Asia under the Transports Internationaux Routiers (TIR) Convention, a customs agreement that facilitates the international transport of goods.
“The successful execution of the first pilot to Tashkent will build confidence among traders and transport operators from both sides to adopt TIR for cross border trade and transit and boost regional trade integration and connectivity,” said USAID in a statement.
The TIR Convention was signed in 1975 under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). Pakistan acceded to the TIR Convention on July 24, 2015 and was declared as a ‘TIR operational country’ by the IRU on April 19, 2018. TIR is widely used for international transit of goods in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and is being rapidly adopted in Afghanistan and Central Asian countries which are all contracting parties to the Convention. (Wadsam)