Discussions on the role played by regional connectivity in the economic development of countries along the so-called “Silk Road” reached a fever pitch during the twenty year Global War on Terror (GWOT). The same period, however, saw increasing attempts to rigidify national borders and restrict mobility across them. These paradoxes shaped local experiences of mobility in the borderlands of South and Central Asia during the years of the GWOT and are continuing to have profound effects on the social, economic and political dynamics of this complex transregional arena. As the attacks on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC unfolded, I was drinking tea with a Shiʿi Ismaili family in a village in the mountainous Chitral    region    of northern    Pakistan . The bazaar nearby was as busy as usual. In the 1990s, butchers, bakers and money dealers from northern Afghanistan had done a brisk business with local villagers in bazaars across the region; men from Tajikistan laboured in the village’s rice fields. Movements of people (refugees, labourers, and fighters) and commodities (especially lapis and animals) closely connected     neighbouring     regions     of Afghanistan,   Tajikistan,   and   Pakistan and brought societies into proximity with one another. The Global War on Terror imposed restrictions on such forms of transregional mobility and the forms of social interactions with which they were enlaced. States across the region increasingly depicted cross-border activities as a security risk and depicted mobile persons as threatening. Projects of “border security” - often supported by international organisations - were ubiquitous. A fence was constructed along parts of the Afghanistan and Pakistan boundary . “Border markets” were opened at various points along the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan in order to enable cross-border trade and social exchange yet only under the watchful eye of officials. All the while, militants active in the Taliban’s war against the NATO-supported government in Kabul found their way across mountain passes, often paying local strongmen in northern Afghanistan taxes for the ability of doing so. Fixed and rigid borders coexisted with more localized forms of control over territory in a manner reminiscent of the hybrid forms of government important for life in the region from the colonial era onwards. While restrictive border policies constrained regional mobility, major powers paradoxically promoted ambitious “regional connectivity” projects in the same period as an economic panacea, reflecting the competing impulses shaping the GWOT era. Cross-border trade facilitated by improved infrastructures was presented locally and internationally as the solution to Afghanistan’s instability, an idea embraced by local elites including President Ashraf Ghani. Formal projects of “regional connectivity” - from Hilary Clinton’s “the New Silk Road” to China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” - promoting infrastructural development and “people to people exchange” flourished in the neoliberal environment fashioned by the GWOT. People living across the region experienced these paradoxical policy developments in contrasting ways. Villagers living on neighbouring sides of colonial-era borders found it increasingly difficult to meet one another and maintain kin ties. Yet traders in a hot seat of the GWOT - Afghanistan - benefitted from a massive influx of foreign capital into Kabul. Transporters moved truckloads of construction materials and fruits between Iran, Central Asia’s post-Soviet successor states, and Pakistan . Infrastructural developments - bridges, new and old - eased the work of transnational nexuses of transporters, government officials, local strongmen, armed militants and smugglers who moved the fuel and shipped the hardware of the GWOT. Economic activities such as these had important social implications. Increasingly capitalized Afghan commercial networks extended their reach, economically, socially, and geographically and in the process forged new markets and scales of regional connections. Doing business with Central Asia, for example, required Afghan traders to find trustable local partners. Afghans had lived as exiles and used trade as a survival strategy across the Central Asian Republics since the collapse of both Afghanistan and the Soviet Union in 1992. After 2001, having knowledge of local conditions and state structures, small-scale market traders from Afghanistan living in Central Asia became important middlemen between Afghan merchants and local state officials. Afghanistan’s merchants successfully managed flows of capital, commodities, and commercial personnel along increasingly complex routes. Wholesale markets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Odesa, and Minsk and Almaty were the nodes of a thriving range of networks comprising Afghan traders, exiles, and refugees. Commercial centres such as the “international trade city” of Yiwu   in   China saw Afghan merchants open trading offices that sent commodities across the world and invest capital available to them in restaurants, hotels and leisure facilities. In the Arabian Gulf, Afghan merchants emerged as major players in the import-export trade, as well as a range of business activities widely held to be related to money laundering. The fragile political situation in Afghanistan alongside the increasing intensity of conflict between the country’s government and the Taliban meant that the country’s savvy merchants as well as the government officials with whom they worked invested in homes, permits and passports in countries whose authorities also had a keen eye for GWOT cash. Citizens of Afghanistan ranked alongside those of Iraq in the list of the most numerous foreign buyers    of    property    in    Turkey , for example. By 2021, Dubai and Istanbul, rather than Peshawar or Mashhad, let alone Chitral and Khorog, were the cities in which Afghanistan’s merchants opened offices, bought property, and stationed their families. The Global War on Terror transformed the socio- commercial geographies of intersecting regions of Central, South and West Asia. The concurrent flows of capital and processes of bordering brought some previously distant regions closer to one another as they created a distance between neighbours. The GWOT narrowed the scope of human mobility across historically connected and adjacent regions of South, Central and West Asia in major ways. As a result, the prolonged war has reduced the potential for social, cultural and economic interpenetrations across national borders and thereby furnished the ground for further inter-regional tensions and conflicts, at both the local and national levels. All this is a far cry from the promise of improved connectivity and regional prosperity made during the GWOT.